It’s about time to do spring cleaning with your passwords and accounts again

Every year (or twice a year in the meantime) I venture through my passwords and accounts and do some spring cleaning or harvesting. Given up with remembering passwords and using the same password on different service years ago, I still need to take this time to recap my personal security status. By using a password manager like Bitwarden after switching over from its various ancestors, this task comes quite easy and can elaborate one’s own account security to a new level - let me give you some inspirations on this (mandatory) process.

At times where the Internet was a nice and comfortable place to stay, passwords were short, easy-structured and - therefore - easy to remember. „One password fits all“ was quite common during these times but security (and attackers!) evolved so the first step is to check wether your passwords are safe or not. In general, people don’t use written-down passwords under their desk pad anymore, neither they do with putting all passwords into an Excel-sheet - so the first choice of getting a modern style of personal security is to choose a password manager.

There are plenty of them around, online or offline, Open or Closed Source so the choice is up to you. As for myself, I once stumbled from 1Password on the Mac over Enpass (which does not need to mean anything) to Bitwarden and stayed there. Paying some bucks for a certain and good app / service is no problem but I disliked the subscription-model 1Password turned to - Enpass did the same, but suscription-or-not is yet another topic and so I finally went to self-host my Bitwarden-vault based on Vaultwarden. Let’s assume you have found your personal password manager you want to use and which suits your needs. Check, level 1 accomplished!

In the meantime, you have created your own vault and stored its on your local hard drive, just having the need to remember the one and only master password to access it. Great - go ahead. I know that there are many solutions using a master password as well as your fingerprint, face unlock, a security token and many other authentication methods to strengthen the security of your personal password vault. Use them wisely, use them in the way you can manage them - if a single, complex master password is enough for you, there is nothing to complain about. If you want more security - implement it!