Yesterday, I bid farewell to the LastPass Password manager with whom I had a long association. A little over 10 years ago, I saw the writing on the wall and realized that I needed help with password management and nervously signed up with this new and up-and-coming password manager called LastPass. To encourage more users, LastPass offered a 5-year deal for $60. I signed up for this deal and was pleasantly surprised by what the tool could do. As it is with a lot of startups, the energy levels are high when starting out and new releases brought new functionality regularly. But that pace dropped off precipitously and in the last few years, they sort of sat on their laurels and the tool became passe and dated.
To compound their problems, a series of hacks last year exposed their basic claim of security for your passwords. Unknown hackers managed to clone several password databases and then using state-of-the-art computers, they managed to crack user master passwords even those that were 10 or 12 characters long. How many of us have passwords that are that long? I do not blame them for being hacked - it happens to the best of us. What bothered me was their response. At first, they hid the hacking attempts and when they were forced to announce it, their press releases made it sound like it was the customer's fault for having weak passwords etc. Even after it was decisively proven that they had several issues with how they stored those passwords, the CEO never made an attempt to apologize to his customers.
Anyway, I thought moving on from LastPass would be difficult but to my pleasant surprise, 1Password made this transition seamless. I was blown away by how smoothly I was able to shift my entire password database to 1Password. Even the user experience in the browser/desktop/mobile was nicer compared to LastPass. It reinforced a concept that is well-known in the Bay Area. In order to grow, change is a necessity. It applies to everything from software development to job advancement. Keep innovating by changing your environment with a constant focus on quality.
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