News: Free password manager is here for students

Password Managers take a lot of the stress out of remembering and maintaining large numbers of passwords and keeps them safe. As part of our ongoing efforts to help our students improve their cyber-security LastPass Premium Password Manager is being made available to all students of the University for free.

What is a Password Manager?

Password managers store login information for on line accounts. They then can automatically enter them into forms when you visit your favourite websites. This helps prevent cyber-attacks and reduces the need to remember lots of different passphrases.
They also allow you to use strong and unique passphrases for each site and provide a secure and efficient way to manage them.
They encrypt your login information and store it either in local memory of your device or in the cloud. This means that no-one can access the information to misuse it.
When you set up your account, you need to choose a really strong passphrase. That will be what protects all your details you must be able to remember it. Help on how to select a strong one is at:

 

How do I access LastPass?

This new service is provided and managed by LastPass directly for the University. If you have a University of Edinburgh email account, you can head to:
 

https://lastpass.com/partnerpremium/UniversityofEdinburgh

From here you can set up your own Premium account.  If you already use LastPass, you can also upgrade to Premium for free.

 

You will need to do this annually using if you want to keep your free premium account.

 

Is using a Password Manager a good idea?

The short answer is: “Yes.”

The more detailed answer is: “Yes, but not for everything.”

Password managers make it easy to maintain the account details that you use every day. However, there are some accounts that should be memorised as they are so important:
  • Banking Passwords
  • Main email account

Why your main email account? That’s where all your reset requests and the like will go should your accounts be compromised or you need to change your details.

Other than these few restrictions, you are good to go!

 

If you are unsure about this topic, a good source of information is the National Cyber Security Centre

What does the NCSC think about Password Managers?

 

Who do I go to for help for LastPass?

As this service is provided to us directly by LastPass, if you need help or want more information you should go to their support pages at:

https://support.logmeininc.com/lastpass

LastPass manages student accounts and as such all support requests should go to them.

 

Do I have to use LastPass? Can I use my current password manager?

Use of LastPass is not mandatory for students. If you already have a service or process that you use for managing Passwords then please keep doing so!

 

If you have any other questions about cyber security, you can find lots of details on the University website:

https://www.ed.ac.uk/infosec

or by contacting the Information Security team at

informationsecurity@ed.ac.uk

This article was published on