Tag Archives: Dashlane

A large botnet is being used to brute-force passwords for a significant number of WordPress blogs. And by large, we mean large…

The botnet is estimated at using some 90,000 computers and tens of thousands of unique IP addresses in its increasing number of attacks. As is the case with brute-force attacks, conventional methods of stopping them, such as blocking IPs after several failed login attempts, won’t hold up. What’s stopping it?

Strong, unique usernames and passwords.

The attackers are targeting users with the most frequently reused usernames and passwords: admin, test, administrator, root; 123456, 11111, etc. By not using those credentials, Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress says, “…you’ll be ahead of 99 percent of sites out there and probably never have a problem.”

WordPress advises you to update your username and password to something strong and unique. WordPress.com users should enable two-step authentication. We add our strong support to that advice, plus one tip.

Use a password manager

Now is also a good time to set up Dashlane, a password manager that helps protect you against such attacks. When you have the ability to randomly generate and securely store your passwords – and autofill them instantly all over the web – you’re not dependent on having to create easy-to-remember (read: easy-to-guess) passwords or reuse them. And when you have a personalized Security Dashboard showing you where your weak spots are, you can be proactive about your online security. 

For the strongest passwords you’ve ever had – and never had to remember - get Dashlane today.

Tax Day is here again. Did you stay up last night finishing your itemizations? Does your accountant know you as the client with a shoebox full of receipts?

Well, by this time next year, your life — and your accountant’s — could be very different. Imagine a world where all your online purchases were kept in one safe, secure place for you to review whenever you need?

This world is possible, thanks to our Dashlane app.

In a sense, keeping track of online buying can be even more disorganized than that shoebox-full of physical receipts, because, well, at least that shoebox is one centralized repository of spending. When we buy and shop online, our receipts are fragmented. Receipts can end up in different email inboxes, and unless you’re printing them out or saving screenshots as you go, you can often forget to take full stock of your spending in the past year come tax time. Not to mention that sometimes email search can be a pain — or simply impossible.

Our app saves all online purchases as you make them, and allows you to categorize what you buy online so you can easily divide personal spending from gifts, and work expenses from holiday shopping.

Not only do you get to see your purchases and keep them in one centralized place, you can also pull up screenshots of the check-out process itself to verify all of the details. (This can come particularly in handy if you ever have an issue with a retailer.) You can also organize your spending according to chronological order, or instead divided according to merchant, price or category type.

So instead of fumbling around for crumpled pieces of paper or starting an inbox search that might actually take you the rest of your life, just use Dashlane. It’s easy, it makes sense and most importantly people will assume you’re a put-together human.

And it gets better: Soon we’ll have ways to join your digital receipt shoebox to your physical one. One receipt repository to rule them all! Does it get any better than that? By this time next year, you might look forward to Tax Day as a holiday.

Watch our video on our purchasing features — including our express check-out and purchase storing functionality:

Here we are. Public launch day. Hello! Wow, we need to get some sleep.

Anyway, as the team prepared for this day, I focused on getting our story straight. I always knew that by taking the marketing reins at Dashlane, I’d have to eventually deal with a way of coming up with a simple and easy way to describe our product.

See, this is so daunting because our app has various functionalities — which is, ultimately, a good problem; we’re no one-trick pony. So as we worked to relaunch our website with a brand-new marketing story that we felt did the product’s myriad functionalities justice and would speak more clearly to our users and website visitors, I realized I’d finally have to sit down and really think about our tagline.

Prior to my official start at Dashlane, the tagline used was: “Every Login, Every Checkout, Simplified.” This is not inaccurate. Dashlane does simplify every login and checkout experience online, but I felt that it didn’t really get at the core of our app.

So I took stock of all the different ways we could describe Dashlane’s functionalities. These included, but were not limited to: “smart wallet,” “password manager,” “shopping assistant,” and “personal data assistant.” (And then of course, for that last phrase, there are the infinite permutations: “personal data locker,” “personal data dashboard,” “personal data vault.”)

These are all true — and we are likely to use them from time to time moving forward — but none of these speak to our underlying mission, which is to place personal data in the hands of users, in a super-secure and private way. Further, not only does Dashlane empower users to store their data safely, it also allows them to use that data conveniently.

That’s how we ultimately got to framing our new website. We’re currently rotating a few different taglines which illuminate the overarching Dashlane philosophy. Because while yes, we do make it easier for you to shop and pay online, to login and register for web accounts, and to use all kinds of key personal data in ways that save you time while at the same time making you more secure — all of these benefits are really in the service of empowering users to take control of their personal data because, well, it’s theirs.

Of the three taglines we’re currently testing, the one in the screenshot above is my favorite: “Make your personal data work for you.” But the other two — “All your personal data and purchases, in your hand” and “All your purchases and personal data, in your hands” — also speak to the greater purpose that informs our work here at Dashlane. (By the way, if you have any opinions or suggestions, please share them with me. We can always use a fresh pair of eyes.)

And as the Dashlane team discusses the exciting enhancements and new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks and months, we’re committed to ensuring they’re all directly connected to the spirit of securely empowering users to save and use their data however they’d like.

P.S. If you want to know more about how secure and private your personal data is when you enter it on Dashlane, read our Security and Privacy policies, which include basic points as well as techy white papers that spell everything out. If that doesn’t appeal to you here are the basic points you ought to know:

• All of your personal data is locally encrypted on your own computer (and other devices, when our mobile apps come out soon), and is accessible only to you via your master password, which no one else has access to and which we do not store on our servers.
• Not even the Dashlane team can see your personal data. We’ve basically built a secure vault for you and thrown away the key. (Again, the key is your master password.)

Hi, I’m Jim. I work in user support at Dashlane. Before I worked here, I was at another Internet company that, at the time, had a fairly small staff compared to its user base. One of the biggest complaints we received was that we had no phone number. Users demanded that they be able to call us, and we continued to promise them that we would get a line, despite the fact that we didn’t have the resources to handle answering so many phone calls.

Both our users and our managers had this sense that our user support team needed a phone number to show we cared. But would that really have done any good? Would a user have felt more cared for if they called a number and got put on hold for several minutes only to be rushed through the call so the rep could get to the next one? And if we outsourced our calls, would our users truly enjoy those conversations?

To be clear, our user support team was comprised of very caring representatives who did their best to help, but overwhelming them with a phone system would have added undue stress to their jobs and, further, would have created an unobtainable promise that with phone support the user would be attended to faster and therefore, somehow, better.

Now let’s leave the tech bubble for a second, and think about in-real-life customer support. I have two very specific memories about waiting in line.

One time, I was at a Hertz car rental location. The line was long and hadn’t moved for several minutes due to a slow or demanding customer at the front, but the single employee did not seem to notice that there was a growing line of impatient customers waiting. All the while a closed-circuit television loudly blasted advertisements for the company we were already patronizing.  The effect, no doubt the opposite of what their marketers were hoping, left me with a feeling of contempt whenever I saw those ads again or considered the possibility of using Hertz again.

The other line was at a Chipotle restaurant. The line was also very long — much longer even — but walking down the line was an employee with a small credit-card device, who took orders from those who were paying with plastic. He’d ring those customers up and they would merely hand over their receipt when they finally reached the register. Whether or not this did anything to speed up the process, I can’t determine — if it did, it likely wasn’t by much — but the simple act of being acknowledged while waiting made the experience of waiting much better.

Now I realize I just said that waiting for something without acknowledgment is a pain, but that sometimes attempts at instant gratification fail. A bit contradictory, I’ll admit.  But it boils down to this: We need to express care and value for the user without promising unrealistic expectations that will later disappoint. Companies’ relationships with their consumers should be built upon the same blocks regular one-to-one relationships are based: Honesty and commitment.

Here at Dashlane I run the user support team, and the way I view my job is similar to the company’s overall idea of ownership — users are in total control of their data and their security. In the same way, we want to share ownership over users’ support experience. What this means is users can be assured we will always listen and value everything they bring us. Everything users tell us is important; every issue brought to our attention will be considered and worked on. Not everything can be achieved, but that’s fine. We won’t make false promises and instead, we will ask you how we can come close.  Ultimately, we want Dashlane to feel as much your product, your app, as it is ours. Because, well, it is.

In the meantime, I actually can promise we’ll respond to all feedback sent to support@dashlane.com and through our app’s bug reporter within 24 hours. Well, maybe slightly longer on weekends, when we get a chance to sleep in.

We are excited to announce the release of our Beta 3 version. If you are a Dashlane user, you will receive this new version through automatic updates. If you aren’t a user but would like to be, please go here.

We have worked on further improving the Dashlane experience as well as integrating many of your requests in this release including:

• New Countries: It is now possible to add contact information for more than 250 countries. For the moment, we still recommend using Dashlane on English and French language sites.
• Memory Usage: We have made significant improvements to deal with memory issues reported by some users of the Mac version.
• Secure Notes: You can now save secure notes to the login/passwords you store with Dashlane.
• Credit Card Sync: You can now synchronize credit cards details between your devices. This option is disabled by default.
• ClickToPay: Dashlane now captures screenshots of every purchase you make with your credit card.
• Getting Started: For new users, we have added a “Getting Started” section allowing them to quickly get on board with Dashlane.
• Password Import: Significant improvements have been made to the password import feature on the Mac version.
• Browser Support: Firefox 11 support and Chrome 18 have been added and we have improved the management of browser updates.
• Bug Fixes: Over 700 bugs fixed thanks to your help and feedback.

Please feel free to contact us at support@dashlane.com if you have any feedback or issues.

We are getting close!