A password manager is an empathetic and important account and piece of software. Obviously, it would be catastrophically bad if one was ever found to be malicious and stealing passwords from its entire user base. However, this isn’t the only risk as a password manager is a single point of failure. Possibly the worst thing that can happen to you is that you forget your master password.
Normally, if you forget a password, you can just use the password reset function and check your email account to recover your account and log back in. With password managers, your master password is used as the encryption key. You can’t decrypt your data without it. This means that there is no way to recover your account if you forget your password. Unfortunately, if you can’t access your password vault, you can’t access any of your accounts. In the best-case scenario, you have to recover all of your accounts and save the new details. In the worst-case scenario, you’re logged out of your email account. You are then entirely unable to access or recover any of your accounts.
Should You Even Set a Password Hint?
Generally, the cybersecurity community’s advice is that you should never put helpful password hints to any account, as they make it easier for a hacker to gain access. With the master password of password managers, however, this issue gets a little murkier. On the one hand, a password hint could help a hacker to guess your master password and gain access to your entire vault. On the other hand, if you forget your master password, you could permanently lockout out all of your accounts. Bitwarden’s password hint process even protects against the hacker threat by emailing you the hint rather than showing it on the website. However, this could leave you in limbo again if you don’t have access to your email.
How to Change Your Bitwarden Master Password Hint
If you decide that you want to change or set a password hint to help you forget your master password, doing so is pretty easy. To be able to do so, you need to sign in to the Bitwarden web vault. Switch to the “Settings” tab once you’ve signed in. The password hint field will be the third textbox down in the default “My account” section, with the label “Master password hint.” Enter your new master password hint, and then click the “Save” button to save the change.
Continued access to your password manager is critical to your continued access to all of your other accounts. As such, setting a password hint that should actually jog your memory without explicitly giving away the password can be a good idea. By following the steps in this guide, you can change your Bitwarden master password hint.
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