Security Center

The Security Center gives you an overview of your password health to learn which passwords are weak, duplicates, and old. This feature is a tool to help you gauge your password strength and weakness, and is not a location where your mSecure data is stored.

On your Desktop

In the desktop application, you will find the Security Center in the left-side menu bar. Here, you can access it at any time.

The Security Center has three main areas to help you identify password issues:

1. Weak passwords, on the left.
2. Duplicate passwords, on the middle.
3. Old passwords, on the right.

You can view each option individually using the drop-down menus., and even change your password within a suggested record within the Security Center.

The Security Center on mobile

To find the Security Center on mobile, tap on the Menu icon in the upper left corner, then tap "Security Center".

The Security Center has three main areas to help you identify password issues:

1. Weak passwords, on the left.
2. Duplicate passwords, on the middle.
3. Old passwords, on the right.

You can view each option individually using the drop-down menus., and even change your password within a suggested record within the Security Center.

Are your passwords weak?

People who steal your personal data care a lot about the tricks we use to make our passwords easy to remember, and they try those first. To judge the strength of your passwords, mSecure uses an open-source method called “zxcvbn”. Simply put, it allows mSecure to judge the strength of your password against over 30,000 of the most common passwords, words, names, keyboard patterns, dates, and more.

mSecure will list your weak passwords in categories for "Very Weak", "Weak", and "Satisfactory." The very weak passwords are passwords we strongly recommend you update while the satisfactory passwords are passwords we recommend you update.  

We recommend you use mSecure’s Password Generator to create the strongest password each website will allow.

Have you reused similar passwords?

Many people reuse or introduce small variations into the same password for different websites. Using a password more than once is one of the main reasons people have multiple online accounts broken into at once. It's easy to see where you've reused passwords, as your accounts that share similar passwords are grouped together in the "Duplicate Password" section.

We recommend you use mSecure's Password Generator to generate a new and unique password for each of your accounts.

Are your passwords old?

mSecure views a password as old if the password is older than 3 months, 6 months, and 9 months and provides those three separate categories under "Old Passwords." In the future, we will introduce the ability to set your old password lengths. Although the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recommended not changing account passwords so too often, we believe that is generally because forcing users to change passwords often without the use of a password manager results in users creating very weak or similar passwords when forced to change their passwords. 

When we change our passwords by force, we typically choose those that are similar to what we already have — similar letters, numbers, themes, and patterns. That means that it’s pretty much just as easy for a predator to penetrate your accounts as it was a pre-password change, so there’s not much of a point to this practice.

Very frequent password changes also result in people making silly mistakes, such as leaving a sticky note on their desk with the password written down on it. So, in some cases, frequent password changes could cause more risk than just leaving them as they were.

We recommend you use mSecure's Password Generator to generate a new and unique password for each of your accounts.

Excluding records or passwords from the Security Center

If you would like to exclude a password from being a part of the Weak Passwords, Duplicate Passwords, or Old Passwords sections, you can click on the "ignore" option to the right of each record in the Security Center. This will remove this password from the calculation in the section you are on. If you later want to undo an exclusion, simply click on the "Reconsider" option next to the record in the "Ignored" listing.

Reasons to exclude or ignore passwords might be because several accounts share the same password through no fault of your own, such as Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, or someone has shared a password with you that you cannot change yourself.

The bottom line

It is important to regularly check your password health as a precaution to protect your data. You can use the Security Center as a tool to easily identify where your password security needs the most attention, and you can also use the Password Generator to change your passwords immediately. mSecure's Security Center makes maintaining your password health simple and is another benefit to you as an mSecure user.

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