Dashlane is an excellent password manager. We love how easy it is to sync your account across devices and browsers and setting up your account (for first time users) and generating passwords takes almost no time at all.
But having strong passwords isn’t the only way to make sure your accounts are safe. Even the strongest, longest, and most complex passwords are rendered ineffective if a company’s hacked and the password gets out. Hackers and scammers may also find and use other important personal details such as addresses, credit card numbers, or other key pieces of information to launch the start of an identity theft attack or SIM-Jacking attack.
To provide support and protection against these other risk factors, Dashlane offers some additional security features you may want to take advantage of to make sure your accounts are as secure as possible and to know when your passwords or other personal information are being leaked.
We’ll show you how you can expect from these features and how to best use them.
Identity Dashboard
Dashlane’s Identity Dashboard (available on desktop and mobile, not the web app) offers an easy view of what risk factors you’re currently exposed to. To view the Identity Dashboard, hit the Identity Dashboard tab on the desktop app. On iOS, it’s found under the “Tools” section and on Android phones, click on the main menu icon, then click on ‘Password Analysis”
Password Overview
The top section of the dashboard will give you a quick summary of how healthy your Dashlane passwords are. You’ll get a health score based on any risk posed to your passwords and you can also see which passwords have been compromised (in a data breach), which have been reused, and which are considered weak passwords. You can click on Manage Accounts which will take you to the Password Health tab (we’ll go over that section later)
Dark Web Monitoring
If you’re a Premium Dashlane user (which is included in our Priiv Privacy Bundles), you have access to Dark Web Monitoring. This feature takes your email address and checks it against known data breaches to see whether your account information has been leaked or stolen because of a data breach. This could include credit card data, email addresses, passwords, social security numbers or more.
If the Dark Web Monitoring finds that passwords were leaked as part of a data breach tied to your email address, it will flag the password as compromised if you had that account stored in Dashlane.
You can also add up to 5 additional email addresses just to make sure you’re being comprehensive about what accounts have been hacked or compromised.
Security Alerts
The longer tab on the side displays a running list of security alerts that are tied to the accounts stored on Dashlane or related to any data breaches flagged from Dashlane’s Dark Web Monitoring. Here’s an example of an alert related to Classpass’ data breach from 2018.
Dashlane will tell you when the data breach happened, what email it was linked to (important if you’re monitoring multiple emails), the affected site, and what information was leaked in the data breach.
For non-premium users, security alerts will be tied to any accounts you’re storing on Dashlane. So, for example, if you have your Spotify account details stored in Dashlane and they end up getting hacked and leaking passwords months from today, Dashlane will let you know and suggest you change your password to minimize any risk.
Password Health
A common use of Dashlane (and something we recommend doing) is adding your existing accounts and login details to Dashlane. This will help you autofill your existing logins as needed but will also let Dashlane check whether any of those passwords are at risk via its Password Health feature.
The Password Health tab will let you know what passwords are compromised in past (and future) data breaches, which have been reused across your saved accounts, and which are weak. It’s a great way to quickly take stock of your existing accounts and upgrade the ones that are riskier than you feel comfortable.
Here’s a quick rundown of each category.
Compromised: Passwords/accounts will show up here if a data breach tied to that account is publicly discovered. If you have a Premium account, any accounts that have suffered past data breaches will show up here as part of the Dark Web Monitoring feature mentioned earlier.
Reused: As we’ve mentioned before re-using passwords is one of the more riskier habits you can have when it comes to passwords. If one leaks, hackers will try password/login combinations on other accounts so it’s better have unique ones for every account. Dashlane will tell you if you’re reusing passwords across your saved accounts.
Weak: Pretty self explanatory. If you’re using “!2345”, short passwords, or passwords that could be easily figured out, they’ll show up here.
Excluded: If you want to exclude any of your passwords or accounts from being analyzed or showing up on these lists, they’ll show up in this tab.
If you want to replace any of these accounts, hover over the password and click on “Replace Now”. You’ll be taken to the account’s website on your default browser so you can go through the process of replacing the account.
As you replace your password, make sure to use Dashlane to generate a strong password and update the login with the newly created password. You’ll see your Password Health score rise and see fewer accounts compromised in the tab.
If you have a lot of passwords that are flagged, for whatever reason, you can turn on the “Only show critical accounts” filter which will only show accounts tied to Business, Finance, Shopping, Health, and Social Media. This makes it easier to prioritize which accounts you want to update first.
If you’re new to Dashlane, we recommend uploading your first 10 most critical accounts to Dashlane and checking the Identity Dashboard and Password Health tabs to see if any of those accounts require an update. As you continue using and adding accounts to Dashlane, you can make this account maintenance just a regular part of using the tool.
