Tip-Of-The-Week

January 5, 2007

From the Free Computer Consultant

http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com

Passwords - Generate, Save, Manage and Protect

There has been a lot of debate lately about password usage. If you're like me you're starting to accumulate dozens of passwords for websites, forums, ecommerce, banking and you name what else.

Some of these passwords, for chat forums and what-not, certainly can be the same easy to remember password that you use most of the time. But that's not the case for anything that includes your finances or identity - whether buying products or banking and brokerage.

There are three basic needs you have to fulfill with passwords that do matter, I'll call them secure passwords:

1. You have to be able to create one with varying rules of complexity. Rules that are dictated by the website. Interestingly enough, I know of banks and brokerages that do NOT allow special characters and are NOT case sensitive! For me, those are the exception, the rule is to use both.
2. Once you create a secure password, how do you remember it? Since you can't use the same password everywhere, you need to manage this ever growing volume of data.
3. Ok, now the secure password is accessible to you, how do you make sure that no one else can use it; in other words, protect it?

My answer is Password Safe, which is written up on my website. You come up with one secure password or phrase to remember and that unlocks the entire database of all of your passwords. And it doesn't store just passwords and password history. You can type any other notes in there as well.

Password Safe is free, and it is a great product. One thing it doesn't do, however, is fill in the passwords on websites. Mozilla Firefox will do this, but that's probably not a good idea with "secure" passwords. And unless you backup your Firefox configuration, those passwords are perishable, not manageable.

RoboForm, while not free, will do pretty much what Password Safe will - generate and securely store passwords - and fill in those passwords on website forms as well. And it gets high reviews. At $29.95, I consider it enough of a value to mention to people who generally like things free.

If you aren't currently using one of these programs or one like it, I highly recommend you do. And, as always, backup your password data! Hope this information is of use to you, that's it for this week.

When was the last time you backed up YOUR PC?

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