You have a strong password. Here's why your online accounts are still at risk

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Mobile<br>You have a strong password. Here's why your online accounts are still at risk<br>Think of your online security as three layers — not just one.

By Karandeep Singh

Jul 15, 2026 — 6:30 AM ET

Megan Ellis / Android Authority

Follow us on Google DiscoverAdd us as preferred source<br>Raise your hand if you have used Have I Been Pwned to spot yourself in an online breach. Raise your other hand with me if you’ve actually spotted your email or password there at least once 🙋‍♂️.

With every single service requiring you to enter your email or phone number to authenticate yourself, we have all been in a situation where our credentials have leaked — I can bet more than once. While we place disproportionate weight on unique passwords, they make up only a third of your digital security stack.

Sure, passwords play a very critical part in online account authentication, but that doesn’t mean the other two components deserve any less attention. For a bulletproof digital existence, you’ll have to pay equal consideration to your email, password, and two-factor authentication, and here’s how you can achieve it.

What's your weakest security habit?<br>62 votes<br>Reusing passwords<br>19%

No 2FA<br>13%

Using my primary email everywhere<br>44%

I'm pretty well covered<br>24%

Your email address is key to everything

Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority

Your primary email address is your digital identity card, but for some reason, we don’t care for it enough. We tend to hand it out to every other online portal without a second thought. But the fact is that it needs to be kept a secret almost as much as your password, if not more. You might wonder how on earth you could keep your email address a secret when you have just one (or, at most, a handful) of them. How else would you sign up for services or let people reach out without handing them your email?

The answer lies in this little-explored product called email aliases. They are often randomized email addresses that forward any incoming email to your main address without ever revealing it. So you only give others your alias while your primary account stays hidden, saving you from email scams and data leaks. In case a service is affected by a data breach, and your email alias associated with it leaks, you can simply disable that alias and create a new one with just a couple of clicks.

Your primary email address is quite hard to replace given the amount of work it would take to replace it on every single account you've used it on.

Email addresses are perhaps more vulnerable because they don’t get the same secrecy privileges as passwords and are usually handed out in plain text. Moreover, your primary email address is quite hard to replace given the amount of work it would take to replace it on every single account you’ve used it on. It becomes even more important to safeguard it, and thankfully, there are quite a few email alias services, like SimpleLogin and DuckDuckGo, that let you hide a critical part of your credentials without making security a burden.

Doing this will solve the most overlooked part of the equation — but we shall not stop just yet.

Passwords still matter

Karandeep Singh / Android Authority

If emails are a lock, passwords are its key. As always, they still matter, perhaps the most, but not anymore in the way they used to. Online services have pestered us into creating adequately complex passwords using special characters, numbers, and both uppercase and lowercase letters. However, that complexity is of no use if we end up using the exact same password, or a slight variation of it, on every single account. It just defeats the purpose.

Password managers are something we all should be using already. These small little apps take the burden of remembering your passwords off you, and the only thing that you need to remember is a strong master password. The tool can create unique, ambiguous passwords for each of your services on the fly. And even if one of them ends up in a breach, you can be sure that an intruder won’t be able to use it to gain access to your other accounts.

That complexity is of no use if we end up using the exact same password, or a slight variation of it, on every single account.

Entering your passwords manually also leaves you susceptible to phishing attacks because a familiar-looking page layout or domain name can easily trick you into giving away your credentials, but password managers are much harder to con. Some modern password managers come with email alias services built in to help you directly sign up for a service with a secured email and password without needing to juggle multiple services.

And I understand if you’re overwhelmed by the mere thought of changing the passwords for hundreds of services — which is often the thing holding people back from switching to a password manager in the...