How to Set Up a Keeper Account

Here at Directive, we’re big fans of the Keeper password management tool—so much so, that we’re sharing how you can use it to manage and clean up your personal passwords. We’ll start by telling you how to set it up and get started.

Go to https://www.keepersecurity.com/ and click Try it Free on the top right. Then choose Individuals & Families.

Alternatively, you can go here directly to create your Keeper account.

Enter your email address (that one email address that you’ve decided will hold and control all of your accounts). 

Keeper will have you generate a Master Password. This password should follow the same rules as your email password. It needs to be unique, complex, and long. It cannot be the same password! Again, use our guide on password best practices.

Write this password down, date it, label it, and keep it in your safe. This is a good one to memorize, and by the end of all of this, it should be the only password you have to memorize.

Want a cool trick for making secure passwords that you can memorize? Use a series of random words, and pepper in some numbers and symbols. These words shouldn’t be something easily associated with you; they truly need to be random to work.

Grab a dictionary and flip through randomly and point until you get 4 or 5 words.

For example, I got peppermint, streamline, meld, reasonable, and indoor. I can combine these really quick, toss in some numbers and a few symbols and make it secure, but easy to recite in my head.

p3pperMINTstreamline34meld!REASONABLE&ind00r#

Another trick I’ve used in the past is to think of a song lyric, and use the first letter of each word, and pepper in some numbers, symbols, and capitals. Either way, you want your password to be at least 16 characters long and to have capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, and it has to be unique.

Once you enter in your password, Keeper will send you a verification code to your email. Follow the steps to finish creating the account.

Once logged in, you can import your existing passwords into Keeper. This will pull them from your web browser, so if you’ve been storing them there, this is a good time to pull them over. Keeper will usually ask you the first time you log in. Just click Next and follow the instructions. You can also skip this and do it later.

Secure Your Keeper Account

Before we get too far, as always we’re going to secure our account with Keeper and set up Two-Factor Authentication. Click your email address on the top right while logged into Keeper, and select Settings. Then go to the Security option and enable Two-Factor Authentication.

Enter in your mobile phone number or if you use Google, Microsoft or Duo Authenticators, follow the steps to set it up there. That way, if someone tries to get into your account, they’ll need your cell phone to do it.

Keeper has a lot of great tools and features, so we recommend checking out their end-user guides to learn more.

Start Cleaning Up Your Accounts

If you didn’t just create a new email account for this, then it’s pretty likely that a lot of your online accounts are already tied to whatever this email is. While that’s a good step in the right direction, you can still do a lot to secure and organize your online footprint. 

For those of you who just created a new email address for this, I want you to do all the same steps.

This is going to take you some time. Depending on how widespread your online footprint is, it could take hours or even days to reasonably do all of this. I’d recommend brewing up a pot of coffee and doing this from your most comfortable chair.

You are going to be logging into every single account you own, doing a quick self-security check, ensuring they are tied to your one email address, and storing the password in your password manager. The following steps will cover just about any account you have.

Start with the big ones, like your other email addresses, your bank accounts, your social media accounts, and anything that you have tied to finances or bills. By the end of this, you are going to realize you have way more online accounts than you ever thought possible.

Hopefully, this will have made your personal accounts a lot easier to manage. Reach out to us for assistance with your business’ IT by calling 607.433.2200!