Making password management easier

---------------------------------------------------------
Now playing: Songbird by Fleetwood Mac
---------------------------------------------------------

You know what I did today? I spent the morning changing the passwords on all my hosting accounts as well as those of clients whose accounts I manage. Why? Because three of my sites were hacked and someone used them to spam. They uploaded a malicious script to my account and merrily went their spammy way.

Even though I was already a believer in using secure passwords and changing them often due to an incident a few months ago, I had not yet changed the passwords on all my accounts. Well, now I have. Not that having a secure password means you're 100% safe from being hacked, but it can help.

What makes a password weak? Anything that refers to a name, date, or even a regular dictionary word. That means don't use your address, phone number, birth date, anniversary, child's name and age, etc. - you get the picture. Easy to remember, but also easy to hack.

A secure password has at least 6 to 8 characters and consists of numbers, letters (upper and lower case), and symbols.

But it's a huge pain to keep track of those secure passwords, isn't it? They're certainly not memorable. And we've been told not to write them down next to the computer, so how are we supposed to remember passwords?

Well, if your situation is like mine, where you work in a home office where no one untrustworthy could possibly have access to your computer, you could write them down and be pretty confident no one will use them to access your accounts, at least not from your end. But not everyone has that situation, and even if you do but you use weak-sauce passwords, you could still be courting trouble.

My solution? An online password management system. I have used several types of password-remember software including Roboform, LastPass, and 1Password. They all have free options as well as paid.

Probably the best known is Roboform. It works with all the popular browsers as well as the iPhone, allowing you to log in to your favorite sites automatically. It also fills long registration forms and checkout forms for you - no more typing in your name, address, phone, etc. a million times!

Your passwords are encrypted so you don't have to worry about security on that front. Roboform's secure password generator will help you come up with good strong passwords for the sites you register at, and you can also synchronize your passwords between computers, which is really handy.

There's really no excuse anymore not to use secure passwords. Choose an online password manager and give yourself a little peace of mind.

Similar Posts:

None Found