LastPass is my favorite browser extension

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I spend about 92% of my waking day on the web and as I use more services, I tend to create a lot of accounts. The other 8% is when I’m on a plane, but hopefully that will change soon.

My good friend Robert recommended LastPass to me about a year ago. I tried it out and didn’t think it was for me, mainly because I used the same password for everything and just saw LastPass as something I would have to spend time setting up.

Twitter Account Got Hacked

Then, about 2 months ago my Twitter account got hacked and stolen. Luckily, the good guys at Twitter support, worked with me and got my account back. This is when I decided that I needed one of those super cyrpto passwords, one with 9 spots, not found in urban dictionary, and looks like a swear word (!@#$*). I also needed to change my passwords for other web services that had a similar password. This is when I started using LastPass.

Free Version Rocks

I signed up for the free version and it was great. I didn’t have to remember any passwords and best of all each password is unique to the service. I currently have 115 saved accounts in it! Can you imagine, trying to remember 115 account passwords?

Share Passwords without Revealing Your Passwords

Recently, I actually signed up for the paid version ($12/year – pretty cheap). I work on a small team and we all share accounts for certain websites. The coolest feature of all is having the ability to share you login and password with other people and not having to actually share the actual password. This also gives you the ability to easily reject access later down the line.

What do you use manage your passwords? I wonder if Google Chrome/FireFox should bake LastPass into their service by default – what do you think of that idea?

9 Comments

  1. I’ve been using LastPass for a few years now! Huge fan. The paid version also comes with a mobile app – which is what I use a bunch.

  2. I’ve thought about this. I use the torch browser which is chrome based, and therefore with the same problem as chrome with passwords being visible to anyone who can hack a computer. Because of that I memorize all of mine, but it gets hard to keep them straight. Are they really not stored anywhere that can be broken into with this?

    • Hey Brian – Really great comment!

      I don’t believe any system can be 100% hacker proof. I do think LastPass is good because it allows you to have unique passwords that are not guessable (ie a variation of your pet’s name and your birth year). Also their entire company is pretty much dedicated to your passwords staying secure so I think for normal people like me it is perfect.

      Now, if you are ex-CIA you might want to memorize your passwords to be safe.

  3. Hi Rishi: I’m part of the LastPass team and just wanted to say thanks for sharing your story and your experience so far! We’re glad to hear you’re finding the product so useful – and we hope the message will help others consider password managers, before they have to deal with the headache of a hacked account 🙂

    • Hey Amber — quick qs: how does LastPass store passwords? Just locally in your local cache? Or does the LastPass browser extension actually pass those passwords to a cloud-based database somewhere?

      • Hi Elizabeth – Yes, LastPass syncs the data automatically. All sensitive data is accessed locally, meaning it’s encrypted/decrypted on the machine where you’re logging in, with an encryption key that LastPass never has access to. Since we don’t have the key, we can’t decrypt the data, and all sensitive data that’s synced with LastPass is an encrypted blob that we can’t access. The technical term is “host-proof hosting”. Hope that’s helpful – happy to address more questions or concerns!

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