The one password I used for everything (and why I stopped)

Let me own up to something first. For years I used one password for just about everything. Email, Facebook, banking, the lot. It was a good password too. Capital letter and a number and everything. Most of us have done the same, because who can remember forty different logins?

Here's why I stopped, and why it's worth five minutes of your time.

Every so often a big website gets hacked. Not you, not anything you did, just some online shop or forum you signed up to a decade ago. The email addresses and passwords in there end up on a list, and that list gets sold to the highest bidder. Then software goes down the list trying those same details everywhere else: email, Facebook, the banks, Xero, MYOB. It's completely automated.

There's no hacker singling anyone out, a computer is just trying the same key in every door it can find. And the door that matters most is email. Think about what happens when you forget a password: the reset link lands in your inbox. So whoever controls the inbox can reset their way into nearly everything else. Your email password isn't one key on the ring. It's the key to the ring.

The good news is the fix is quick and free.

First, give your email a password it shares with nothing else. The strongest and easiest kind is three or four random words stuck together. Something like "jetty paddock biscuit tuesday" takes centuries to crack and ten seconds to remember, and it beats anything built from a pet's name and postcode.

Second, turn on two-factor authentication for your email and your banking. Scary name, simple thing: when there's a login from a new device, a code gets sent to your phone, and without the code the password alone is useless. Every email provider and bank offers it, usually under security settings, and it takes five minutes. If a password ever does leak, this is what stops it mattering.

Third, sort the rest however suits you. A password manager (an app that remembers them all behind one strong master password) is the tidy option, and the good ones are free or close to it. Even a notebook in a drawer at home works.

That's the one job for this fortnight. New password on the email, code on the phone for email and banking. Twenty minutes, costs nothing, and it quietly closed the biggest gap I had in my own setup.

Stuck on where the settings live? Give me a yell and I'll point you at the right menu.