Passwords are a nightmare. Unfortunately, until something better comes along, you need them to protect pretty much everything you do online: from email, to Facebook to online banking.
Conventional wisdom says to use a strong and unique password for each of your online accounts. A strong password is one that’s very difficult to guess. A unique password is one that’s used for one account only. Do all your online accounts have strong and unique passwords? If not, welcome to the club. Most of us use passwords that are easy to guess, because they’re also easy to remember. We also tend to use the same password across multiple accounts, as yet another way to cope with the madness.
With so many online accounts theses days, how can you possibly be expected to have a strong and unique password for each one? You can’t! At least – not without some help. Fortunately help is at hand. It’s call a password manager. Essentially a password manager is program that acts like a secure vault to store all of your passwords. Our favorite is called LastPass.
The password manager also comes with a password generator, that will dish up super secure passwords on request. These passwords contain nothing but random gibberish, like G6^k5%mAL1$i. Not very user friendly, but then it doesn’t need to be. The password manager will remember it for you. The idea is to replace all your weak, duplicate passwords with these brutes, and store all of them in your password manager.
There’s just one catch. The password manager requires a master password. It’s like the key to the vault. Since this is the password that protects all your other passwords, it needs to be really strong. It also needs to be really easy to remember.
In my next article, I’ll show you how to create just such a password.
Image Credit: Lulu Hoeller on Flickr
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