Online fraud and the theft of passwords is always a present danger when surfing or working on the Internet. Malicious hackers are constantly thinking of new ways to gain access to user's banking or other information, and one of the best ways to prevent your own data from being stolen is to use strong, random passwords for all of your online accounts.
The problem is that most people use the same password for all of their online accounts. Ask yourself, is your email password the same one as for your online banking access? Is yourlogin for your favorite online coupon site the same as it is for your Facebook account? If a hacker got your primary password how many other sites that you use would he now have access to and how much of your life would he be able to steal?
The most important thing an Internet user can do to protect themselves is to use different, secure passwords for every online account that they create. Using a mixture of upper and lowercase letters mixed in with numbers is perhaps the best possible avenue for protecting your online accounts. If someone getsahold of a password for one account they will be unable to access the others because you have used different passwords on each of them. But doing this causes another problem, how to remember all of these different passwords as you navigate from site to site? The answer lies in using a password manager program to collect and store all of your passwords in one secure location that still allows you to seamlessly access them without having to do a lot of extra work.
Using A Password Manager To Collect and Organize Your Passwords
There are a number of programs that a person can use to collect and store their passwords. The simplest (and least secure of these) is to simply create a spreadsheet in Excel or OpenOffice Calc and record the unique passwords that you create for each site. This is also the slowest method as it requires you to look at the paper to get the password each time you visit a site. A better solution is to use a software program such as KeyPass or LastPass (both are free and KeePass works on both Mac and PC) to store passwords locally and then encrypt those saved passwords by assigning a single master password that will lock down the password file making it unreadable by anyone unless they have the master password. For Macintosh users consider trying 1Password. The benefit of this kind of system is that it returns the user to having to remember only one password. Since this password is never used on the Internet it makes it incredibly secure as the only way a hacker could to the list of passwords is to somehow hack into the computer, steal the file, and then somehow guess or brute force the master password.
There are still other ways to safely save and access passwords without using a standalone program. Visit the next article in this series to see how to encrypt and save passwords using only your web browser and a special free plug-in.
