There is no easy way to put this so I’ll just come out and say it – using a password book, an Excel spreadsheet, a word document or worse still remembering the passwords inside your head, is the worst idea since the
There is a good chance you have always done it this way so give me a couple of lines to try and convince you that in today’s world this is like going into a knife fight wearing a string vest.
I know people who use these things. They call them their “Password Books.” Inside, written in painstaking ballpoint pen, is a terrifying list of every secret code they use to access their bank accounts, their medical records, and their online shopping. Others—who consider themselves digital prodigies—simply use their own brains to remember a single, brilliant password but if you can remember the passwords… it is a bad password.
Both of these methods are, to put it mildly, complete and utter madness.
What you actually ought to be doing is letting your Mac handle the whole bloody lot. Because when you save your passwords to your Mac’s built-in system, something brilliant happens.
First of all, let’s address the paranoid elephant in the room: If I save my password onto my mac, that means my password is saved to a computer!
Yes, but your password is already on a computer. The moment you created an account to buy a set of vintage garden shears or a pair of socks, your password was sent off into the digital void and stored on the website’s server.
And that brings us to the real problem. Websites get broken into. It happens all the time. A group of pale teenagers in hoodies hack into the website’s database, snatch the entire encrypted file of user details, and scurry off into the dark corners of the internet like digital rats.
If your password is Fido123, those teenagers will crack the encryption in about four seconds using a basic laptop. But if you let your Mac generate and save your password, it doesn’t pick your dog’s name. It invents something that looks like an explosion in a typewriter factory: xK9#vL2!pQ8z.
To crack a code like that, those hackers would need a supercomputer running until the heat death of the universe.
And here is where the Mac turns into a total masterpiece of engineering.
While the hackers are sitting in their basement staring at this impenetrable wall of random gibberish, your Mac is quietly doing something extraordinary in the background. It continuously cross-references your saved, encrypted passwords against lists of known online data breaches.
The moment that website gets compromised, your Mac taps you on the shoulder and says, “Right. That site you bought the shears from has had a security incident. Your password was in the stolen pile. You need to change it.”
Think about what that means! The hackers have the encrypted file, but because your password is so absurdly complex, they haven’t cracked it yet. And in the meantime, your Mac has warned you, you’ve logged into the site, clicked “Change Password,” and generated a brand new string of absolute nonsense before the hackers could even get through the first character. You’ve closed the door and locked it while they were still trying to figure out where you put the key.
Try doing that with your little black book. A notebook doesn’t ring an alarm bell when a server in California gets breached. It just sits there, looking dusty.
I recommend, stop trying to outsmart the system with your memory, and throw the notepad in the bin. Let the machine do the heavy lifting. It’s faster, it’s infinitely cleverer, and unlike your brain, it doesn’t forget things when it gets distracted.
Now at this point, if you are wondering how you’ll convert all your passwords from book to mac and ensure they are secure, don’t forget we have a password service and if that sounds good please give us a call. Or there is Apple’s own Passwords page here.
