How to use Dashlane to find out how secure you are

Your Password Health: Focused on what matters most

Dashlane's Password Health feature is the easiest way to assess and improve the security of all of your passwords. But some of your online accounts, such as your bank or your email, are more important than others. We designed the Password Health feature to help you focus on improving your security where it matters most.

What you'll see in the Password Health feature

At the top you see your Password Health Score, giving you an overall sense of how you're doing. Underneath, you'll notice five filters for passwords: All, Compromised, Reused, Weak, and Excluded. You can see the count of compromised, reused and weak passwords at the top of the window, right next to the Password Health Score.

Each filter is discussed more fully below.

How your Password Health Score is calculated

Your Password Health Score is based on the following factors:

• Are any of your passwords currently compromised?
• Have you reused similar passwords?
• Are your passwords weak?

Note that you will not be given a Password Health Score if you have fewer than five accounts in your Dashlane.

Are any of your passwords compromised?

Dashlane sends instant security alerts when sites are breached and your passwords compromised. These accounts will appear under the first tab.

In addition to the compromised accounts themselves, Dashlane determines if any of your other accounts use the same or similar passwords, and considers these passwords compromised as well.

Note that if you changed your password after the date the breach itself took place, that account will not be considered compromised and you will not be notified of the breach.

We strongly encourage you to change your compromised passwords as soon as possible.

Have you reused similar 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. 

The Password Health feature will lower your score if any of your passwords are determined to be too similar. It's easy to see where you've reused passwords, as your accounts that share similar passwords are grouped together.

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

It's important to understand that people who steal your personal data generally are not 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 3 to ensure that your passwords are meaningfully different from one another. 

Are your passwords weak?

People who steal your personal data care a lot about the tricks we use to make our passwords easy to remember, and they try those first.

To judge the strength of your passwords, Dashlane uses an open-source method called “zxcvbn”. Simply put, it allows Dashlane to judge the strength of your password against over 30,000 of the most common passwords, words, names, keyboard patterns, dates, and more.

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

Excluding accounts from your Password Health Score

If you would like to exclude an account from being a part of your Password Health Score, you can click on the small "wrong way" sign icon on the far-right when you roll over an account.

This will remove this account from the calculation of your Password Health Score and add that account to the Excluded tab. If you later want to undo an exclusion, simply click on the looping arrow icon on the far-right when you roll over the account on the Excluded tab.

Reasons to exclude accounts 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.

Where should I start?

The list of "At-risk passwords" in the Password Health tab will be ordered by priority. Compromised passwords will be at the top and then reused passwords that are reused the most and then the weak passwords. Therefore, in order to make a bigger impact quickly, you can deal with the passwords starting from the top of the list. 

We recommend you change the passwords for all of your accounts under the Compromised, Reused, and Weak tabs.

The bottom line

Use Dashlane to manage your passwords. Regularly check your Password Health and use this feature to easily identify where your security needs the most attention. Use the Password Generator when changing your passwords.

We also recommend:

• Enabling Two-Factor Authentication to add an extra layer of security to your Dashlane account
• Deleting passwords that are stored in your browsers. Once they are in Dashlane, there’s no longer any need to store them in your browser where others may obtain access to them.