Chat support available. Click the chat icon on the bottom right corner to start chatting with us right away!

mSecure Support

Knowledge Base Forums Submit a ticket

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, it is not a location where your mSecure data is stored.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Finding the Security Center

On iOS and Android Devices

To find the Security Center on your mobile device, 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 (left tab).
  2. Duplicate passwords (middle tab).
  3. Old passwords (right tab).


You can view each option individually using the drop-down menus, and even change your password within a suggested record within the Security Center. This will confirm the change in the record itself, which can be viewed in the "All Records" tab of the main view.


iOS

Android


On Mac and PC

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, in 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.


Security Center Features

Weak Passwords


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. 


NOTE: For Login records, if you click "Change password" next to that record in the Security Center, you will be redirected to change that password within the site it corresponds to. This will then change it in mSecure when you return to the mSecure application.


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



Duplicate 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.


NOTE: For Login records, if you click "Change password" next to that record in the Security Center, you will be redirected to change that password within the site it corresponds to. This will then change it in mSecure when you return to the mSecure application.


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



Old Passwords


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 too often, we believe this is because forcing users to change passwords often without the use of a password manager results in users creating very weak or similar passwords. As long as you use a strong password generated by mSecure, it is never harmful to change your 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 prior to the 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. Again, as long as you use a strong password generated by mSecure, it is never harmful to change your passwords.


NOTE: For Login records, if you click "Change password" next to that record in the Security Center, you will be redirected to change that password within the site it corresponds to. This will then change it in mSecure when you return to the mSecure application.


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




Ignored Records


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 at the top of the section you are viewing. 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.



You can use the Security Center as a tool to easily identify where your password security needs the most attention. and you can 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.

Did you find it helpful? Yes No

Can you please tell us how we can improve this article?

More articles in Set up and use mSecure