It seems easy to just remember one password and use it over and over again. It’s quick to type (once you get used to it), and fast to enter.

But it’s a BAD idea. Why?

Because if anyone get’s hold of your password (by hacking a site where you have an account), they are likely to be able to get access to all your accounts. I had my account on a fitness site hacked–nothing important. It could just as easily have been any seemingly trivial website. But suppose my username was a Gmail account. The hackers will probably next try to access my email account using the same password as the fitness site.

What about my Facebook, Instagram, X, or other social media? Can the hackers find out which bank I use? No they don’t have my bank account number (unless they had hacked some site that improperly stores my payment card information), but its a start. At any rate you’re in for a world of pain until you can clean up all your accounts.

Have you ever been hacked? There’s a site where you can check. Chances are you have: https://haveibeenpwned.com.  If you have, change your email password first. Then change all your financial passwords (bank, credit card provider) followed by subscription and purchase accounts (Netflix, Amazon, etc). These are the sites that can do the most damage to you and on which your day to day life most regularly depends.

And don’t pick a single password to change all these accounts to! Use different passwords for each site.

But how can I remember all these passwords? Password safes are a great and low-cost solution. What are they? Read all about this in our companion article: Do You Use Multifactor Authentication on your accounts? START!

Want more help? Click here to read our article from a while back on exactly this topic.