I’m sure passwords have been on everyone’s mind lately. The Heartbleed SSL flaw has brought the subject to the foreground again. And, at the risk of being repetitive, I’m going to dispense the same advice as I always do in these situations.
GET A GOOD PASSWORD SAFE!
Pardon me for shouting. This is a passionate subject for me.
So, what is a password safe? It’s a small program that holds all your passwords. Each entry can be named for the web site or whatever you want and they can all be organized by whatever categories you create. That way, you remember one password… to get into the program itself; and that password is never sent out over the internet.
But, that’s not where the benefits end. If you only needed the organization aspect you could just get a legal pad. The best part of these programs is in the password creation process.
At the click of a button it will create the kind of password that is so secure you’d never be able to remember it and would be too much of a pain to transcribe. Wonderful, unique, pure password!
OK, getting passionate again. But seriously, the best part of these passwords is they are terribly hard to crack. Even if the hacker gets into your data stream they could spend weeks trying to crack truly strong passwords.
So, what should you use? I use one called Password Safe. But that’s just because I wanted to remember what it did.
Others are available, such as: LastPass, Password Genie and SplashID