With LastPass Premium for Students, no one at Stony Brook University, or LastPass, can ever see your passwords.

During activation, LastPass will ask you to convert the existing account to a LastPass Premium account, or prompt you to create a new one.

1. Go to https://lastpass.com/partnerpremium/sbu
2. Enter your @stonybrook.edu email address and a personal email address to associate with the account
3. Follow the prompts to set up your account

Your LastPass account will persist after you leave Stony Brook, but it will be downgraded to a free account, and lose some of the Premium features. You may, at your expense, choose to continue a Premium subscription. All of your passwords will always remain available to you, even in a free account.

No, it is far and away an enhancement to security. Your passwords are encrypted locally on your computer before they ever leave it, so neither LastPass nor Stony Brook have access to your passwords in human readable form, or any form which can be made human readable.

The primary benefit of using LastPass is the ability to use unique, randomly generated, passwords on each service. Using the same password, or many variants of one password, is a serious security issue in today's landscape. Using unique passwords for each service is great security practice because if one service experiences a breach, you need not change dozens of other passwords. Users taking full advantage of LastPass don't even know their own passwords to these services, as LastPass stores and auto-fills them.

Additionally, LastPass Enterprise (and even the personal Premium version) is protected by Duo Two-Step Login, so even if your LastPass password is compromised, an attacker will still not be able to access your passwords.