If you remember ALL your passwords, we must say it’s quite an achievement. Otherwise one has just so many online accounts these days that it’s a tough job remembering them all. Gone are the days when you just had to remember your email’s and bank’s password. There are passwords to your favorite social networking sites, and then there are those to blogs, phones, photos, games, documents, news sites, bank accounts, expense tracking services, stores, books… the list can go on for quite some time. How on earth are you supposed to remember all of them? Hey, you could use the same password for all your accounts! Or how about keeping them simple enough for you to remember? Unfortunately, none of this is going to work because using the same password for multiple accounts is a huge risk and so is using simple passwords. So, what do you do? Keep reading, of course, because here we’ve mentioned some handy tips that will definitely make managing and remembering your passwords a lot easier!
Use desktop password management tools: Managing and safely storing your passwords will be a piece of cake if you download one of the several desktop tools available that store your passwords encrypted on your hard drive. All you need to do is provide one “master” password to access the rest. Keepass, LastPass (available in free and fee versions), and 1Password for Macs are our favorites. One word of caution, though– if the device where your password is stored gets lost, stolen, or hacked, you can lose your password information. You’ll be prone to attacks, too!
Store your passwords in the Cloud: If losing your device on which you passwords are stored (and thus, opening yourself to attacks) is something you can’t afford, you could go for password managers that are solely accessible online and are hosted in the Cloud. They work the same way as desktop password managers but the difference (AND benefit) is that you don’t have to download and install software on your PC. Plus, you can access all you passwords from any device or system as long as it is connected to the Internet. Even losing your device does not put your passwords at risk! If you’re interested in this option, try tools like Clipperz and LastPass. However, you’d do well to remember that even these sites can be hacked – LastPass was hacked a few months ago.
Use Browser Plugins: You could also opt for tools that work as add-ons for your browser. There are plenty of them! Some generate passwords on the fly while some store the information within your PCs. And then there are others that store passwords in the cloud as well as sync it to your device. So, all you have to do is choose between solely desktop bound password tools and purely online ones. They are often tied to the browser you use, though.
Trust a single site with your Identity: If you didn’t find any of the options above fitting for you, you could simply entrust the security of your online identity to a single provider. Make sure it can manage your passwords in a secure manner, though. You can manage an online identity on your own from sites such as OpenID so that all you’ll be doing is securing and managing one password and identity which in turn will share this to other sites according to your choice. However, you should keep in mind that not all sites may use or be compatible with these federated identity management systems. Plus, like all other sites, there is a possibility of these sites being compromised as well.
Well, each one has a flaw of its own. But still, something is better than nothing, right?
