Password Brain Drain

How many passwords do you have?  In any given month you probably enter over 100 different passwords to access e-mail, bank accounts, favourite retail sites and other assorted stuff.  Now, that can be mind boggling if you have more than one password to remember.

According to security experts you should choose a different password for each one, including numbers, letters, symbols and upper/lower case characters.  Oh, sure – you can remember that many different passwords – or even one password with extra symbols – did that = go before the 3 or was it a + sign?  Does that sound familiar?  And how much do you rely on the “forgot my password” please click here message?

We all probably do the same thing, use a unique password for sites that are extremely important to keep secure such as banking or other financial sites.  All the others share the same easy-to-reember string of letters and digits.  Or you may use the same forget-proof password for everything.  Unfortunately at some point even your dog will know that forget-proof password!  So, any hacker-in-training could figure that out without flexing a single geek muscle.   This will leave you very vulnerable to having your password hacked, especially at sites with less than stellar security to begin with.

Dealing with dozens of passwords is a pain, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.   The solution to trying to remember all those passwords is to come up with unique passwords for eeach site and store them in a safe – a software tool that remembers them, so you don’t have to.   But don’t forget you will have to remember the password for the “safe”.   And, no, don’t write your passwords down in the back of your address book.  That would probably be the first place a burglar would look for information after the refrigerator where you store your diamond necklace!

There are quite a few software programs available to use for password storage.  The most popular and it seems the most secure is Robo Form.  Another password security software you may want to look at is My One Log On.  This suite of tools is based on the web, not on your computer, so you can use it from anywhere.  If you have Norton 360, you do have a built-in password security system.  There are many other free utilities available, but with free, you do get what you pay for, so check out any free utilities very carefully before using them.   Open Source software is free and usually very safe, so you may want to take a look at KeePass Password Safe, a very powerful open-source program.