Tag: passwords

How To: Cancel Your LastPass Account

This is just a PSA type of article, about how to cancel your LastPass account. Below are the reasons why you might want to cancel your LastPass account and how you can go about actually canceling that account.

Below is a copy of a recent email from LastPass:

Dear LastPass Customer, 

We recently notified you that an unauthorized party was able to gain access to a third-party cloud-based storage service which is used by LastPass to store backups. Earlier today, we posted an update to our blog with important information about our ongoing investigation. This update includes details regarding our findings to date, recommended actions for our customers, as well as the actions we are currently taking.

We thank you for your patience and continued support of LastPass.

The Team at LastPass

Click the link in the quoted text for more information.

I can no longer trust LastPass with my passwords and wanted to quit their services, closing my account. The only link I could easily find was at the bottom of their email – and that would simply unsubscribe you from their email list.

With the help of @Condobloke on Linux.org, I was eventually able to find how to close my LastPass account (so I’m told by LastPass). When closing my account, they asked for a reason. The reason I gave was:

I no longer have faith in your security

For the record, I had never used LastPass for anything. I had just signed up for an account. I never actually used the extension or their services.

Cancel Your LastPass Account:

The first link you’ll see is in their email, and all that option does is remove you from their mailing list. You’re ONLY unsubscribing to their email list, not actually removing your account. 

That’s this link:

http://417-klk-478.mktoweb.com/lp/logmeintransact/UnsubscribePage.html?mkt_unsubscribe=1

Link left plain on purpose. That link will ONLY remove you from their mailing list. It will not delete your account. So, I recommend deleting your account before removing yourself from the mailing list.

To delete your account, you need a link provided by @Condobloke:

https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php

Again, the link is left plain on purpose. That link will only get you started.

When you have logged in and clicked the button to remove your account, your account is still not deleted. You need to check your email and they send you an additional link. You can use that link to remove your account, remembering to confirm it when they ask time and time again.

When they ask you for a reason as to why you’re removing your account, you might want to tell them that it’s because you can no longer trust their security. They had the chance to be secure and failed. They might be making the ‘right steps’ now, but those steps should have been made before now.

What You Can Do:

If you’re going to use a password manager, you are better off getting one where you control the data. That means you want an ‘offline password manager’ that’s free and (hopefully) open source (so it can be audited, if need be).

I do not have enough experience with offline password managers to make a recommendation. I also am not going to be the one to suggest a specific product only to find out I sent you barking up the wrong tree. So, my suggestion is that you use your favorite search engine and look up ‘offline password manager’. Then, pick what you think works best for you.

I’ve done some looking and this article looks solid. I make no recommendations based on that link, it just looks pretty thorough to me. The article may contain errors and I’m not responsible for that, as I lack the time to dig deeper into this due to a rather impressive winter storm.

Good luck and do due diligence before deciding on a specific offline password manager platform. Read reviews, check security history, make sure it’s easy enough for you to use, and make sure it works with the software you intend it to work with.

Closure:

Well, I don’t use the ‘News’ category often, but this seemed like an important article to get out there. It’s time sensitive so it’s not going to be scheduled for publication, it’ll be published as soon as I’m done proofreading it.

Stay safe out there. Remember, “Practice safe hex!”

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EDIT: Fixed a typo.

More Ways To Generate Strong Passwords In Linux

In today’s article, we’re going to explore a couple of other ways to generate strong passwords in Linux. It’s going to be a pretty easy task and one most everyone can learn from. It shouldn’t even be a very long article.

Weak passwords are easy to crack. You don’t want that, for obvious reasons. If you want to see how approximately how long it’ll take to brute force passwords, you can check sites like this one. Remember that the time given by that is more or less the maximum time it could take, and your password could be brute-forced (by repeated guessing) much sooner than that.

I’ve previously written an article about generating a sufficiently complex password. That’d be one way to generate strong passwords, but this article will cover a couple of other easy ways to generate strong passwords in the Linux terminal.

Generate Strong Passwords:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your password open, we’re first going to use GPG to create a strong password. Everyone should already have GPG installed, so there’s no reason to cover that in this article. So, to do so, you’d use a command something like this:

It’ll have an output similar to this one:

using gpg to generate a strong password
Obviously, you don’t want to use that password specifically! Use your own!

You can change the 16 to any length you want. It’s obviously the number of characters. 

You can also use OpenSSL, which you likely have installed, to generate a complex password. It’s actually pretty easy and the command is:

Again, you can change the 24 to anything  you darned well please. Sometimes sites will have a maximum password length, which might seem kinda silly – as I think I recall there being a hard limit of 256 characters that the kernel will accept. Either way, the output would be similar to this one:

openssl can generate passwords too
That one is 24 characters long. Yay!

Feel free to mess around with changing the length. OpenSSL is likely installed by default and you don’t have to install pwgen. Both of the tools in this article will likely be installed by default.

Closure:

And there you have it! Another article said and done. This one is about teaching folks how to generate strong passwords in Linux. It’s an easy enough task and this article shouldn’t be too complicated for even the most n00b of the n00bs!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

 

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