Offtopic: Cybersecurity

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Time for my first offtopic subject. Everytime I speak with someone about cybersecurity I always bring up the subject of Multi-factor authentication, and password managers. If setup properly, it's virtually unhackable.

Let me start by explaining what a password manager is. A password manager is like a safe in which we store all of our passwords, this safe is locked with a master password. This way we only have to remember our master password. The password manager is also capable of generating passwords for us, an example of a randomly generated password: 5g!E$m*q^S5w. There are a multitude of password managers available. I have been using Lastpass for the past couple of years.

We can makes this even more secure. By adding multi-factor authentication we add a second security layer to our safe. Multi-factor authentication can work in multiple ways, heh. The most commen way is an app, like Google Authenticator, this app generates a six digit code for each account we have multi-factor authentication enabled on. This random code gets refreshed every thirty seconds. When we try to login to one of our accounts with multi-factor authentication enabled, we will be asked for our six digit code. Only if the code matches we can login. These are two easy and cheap steps we can take to increase our personal cybersecurity.

Until next time.
- Stef Nijenhuis