About two years ago I reached a breaking point. I could no longer remember all of the passwords I was required to have for all of the on-line sites that required them. I have always had an excellent memory. When I was a kid I had memorized all of the telephone numbers of all of my friends, and I still remember them today. Useless knowledge that I can’t get rid of! (I hope there isn’t a limit!) As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that my tolerance for having to remember fleeting and useless information is very low. I just wasn’t going to memorize passwords anymore. For obvious reasons, I decided it would be a bad idea to use the same password on all of the sites that required it. With cybercrime on the rise seemingly everywhere, I was sure that I didn’t what an identity or password of mine used on multiple sites. That way if any one of the sites was compromised then the cyberthug perpetrators couldn’t penetrate other sites that I subscribe to using the stolen information.
After trying several manual techniques for keeping my passwords I finally settled on a password vault I had used where I worked to store server passwords. It’s a great little package called KeePass Password Safe. Now all of my passwords look something like this:
tbluPKtftrsBpK5VU0QSvkCc
or this
*z*@’#e2!P4m.6/dBS\1gHwv
Rather than me rambling on about this I’ll snip the description of the product from their site and paste it right here:
KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).
Excellent tool, I highly recommend using it. I have dozens of user accounts and don’t know the passwords to any of them!
Michael Guidone 