Dashlane's Password Health is the easiest way for you to assess and improve the security of all your passwords—but some online accounts, such as your banking or email accounts, are more important than others. We designed Password Health to help you focus on protecting those accounts first.
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What you see in Password Health
Your Password Health Score gives you an overall sense of how secure your accounts are. You can filter your passwords by All, Compromised, Reused, Weak, and Excluded, and see the count for each.
How we calculate your Password Health score
You need at least five logins to generate a Password Health score. We base your score on these factors:
- Are any of your passwords currently compromised?
- Have you reused similar passwords?
- Are your passwords weak?
We give your critical accounts more weight.
Are any of your passwords compromised?
When a site is breached and your password compromised, Dashlane sends an instant security alert. These accounts appear in the Compromised tab.
In addition to the compromised accounts themselves, Dashlane determines whether any of your other accounts use the same or similar passwords as the compromised accounts and considers these passwords compromised as well.
If you change your password after a breach occurs, we won't consider the password compromised won't notify you of the breach.
We strongly encourage you to change any compromised passwords as soon as possible.
Have you reused similar passwords?
Many people reuse or introduce small variations into the same password for different accounts. Using a password more than once is one of the main reasons people have multiple online accounts broken into at once.
Password Health lowers your score if any of your passwords are too similar. Accounts that share similar passwords appear in the Reused tab.
Hackers who steal your data generally aren't trying to figure out your passwords—their computers are. Differences that seem important to a human may be trivial for a computer. Dashlane uses a measure of difference called Levenshtein Distance with a limit of three to ensure your passwords are meaningfully different from one another.
We recommend you use Dashlane's Password Generator to generate a new and unique password for each of your accounts.
Are your passwords weak?
People who steal your data care a lot about the tricks you use to make your passwords easy to remember, and they try those tricks first. Passwords that Dashlane finds vulnerable appear in the Weak tab.
Dashlane judges the strength of passwords against over 30,000 of the most common passwords, words, names, keyboard patterns, dates, and more. The open-source method Dashlane uses is called "zxcvbn."
We recommend you use Dashlane's Password Generator to create the strongest password each website will allow.
Exclude passwords from your Password Health score
You might want to exclude accounts because someone has shared a password with you that you can't change yourself, the website does not allow for a more secure password, or you are required to use the same password on more than one account, such as with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
To exclude an account from your Password Health score, hover over an account and select the Exclude icon, shown as a circle with a line through it. Doing so removes this account from the calculation of your Password Health score and adds it to the Excluded tab.
If you later want to include the account back into the score, go to the Excluded tab, hover over the account, and select the Include icon, shown as a circulating arrow.
Where do I start?
With Dashlane, you can gain control over your online identity and security with these steps:
- Change the passwords for all of your accounts in the Compromised, Reused, and Weak tabs
- Use the Password Generator when changing your passwords
- Turn on 2-factor authentication (2FA) to add an extra layer of security
- Delete passwords stored in your browsers
The list of "at-risk passwords" in the Password Health tab is in priority order. Compromised passwords come first, followed by your most frequently reused passwords and then weak passwords. To make a big impact on your score, start with the passwords at the top of the list and work your way down.