Help! I’m drowning in passwords

At last count I had over forty passwords for different supplier websites, industry portals, news forums and social media.   I’ll give you my tips here for ensuring these passwords are created and stored to be as secure as possible.

To be secure passwords should be quite long and include a range of upper and lower case characters and not use pet names or family names that may be derived from a hacker having knowledge about your personal life.  You must also avoid reusing passwords across different sites as hacking one account will leave you vulnerable on other sites.  For example if they hack your email password then they can use that to initiate password resets from other sites and gain access that way.  A bit like having deadlocks on all your doors except leaving the back window open.

The best way to manage the plethora of passwords is to use a password manager. These work like a key safe, in that they provide a secure holding place for all your user names and passwords protected by one very strong master password.  There are a number of software products and services that will offer this capability, but the one we use and recommend is a free software called KeePass.  Basically you use a strong master password that is used to encrypt the storage and make it almost impossible to crack. It is also safe then to place this file in say an on line cloud storage such as DropBox or OneDrive to allow you to synchronise the access across multiple computers. Other products such as LastPass have this capability provided as part of a subscription service and is another alternative to KeePass.

KeePass also makes it easier to open the website, as it stores the URL and also has one click function to automatically type the user name and password for that site making access easier.   It is also a convenient tool to have when you create a new password or access a new site to place the user name and password in the safe to avoid scrambling around for lost passwords when you return to that site later.

Overall a great time saver and also keeps you much more secure on line.