Password Security and Maintenance
If you’re an avid online services user, you no doubt have a bundle of passwords filed away under the ink blotter (or coffee cup coaster) which you use to access the sites you use most regularly. I do hope you don’t have the one password for a whole bundle of sites because all it will take is for one of those sites to be compromised (your mail account for example) and a hacker will have access to your online life. Remember social sites often send notifications to a designated email account so a hacker can see your facebook, twitter, github notifications etc.
I’ve just signed up with an online service called LastPass. It allows you to store your passwords for various services under the one umbrella for which you need a well chosen MasterPassword. What I’ve done is got LastPass to generate a bundle of random passwords for various of my online services, store them in it’s “Vault” and set up automated logins for appropriate sites. I’m running LastPass as a plugin on both Chrome and Safari on a MacBook Air. The manual says it works just fine for Windows and Linux installs also.
Please note, LastPass does store your passwords in ‘the cloud’ i.e. an online database. They’re apparently stored in encrypted form so even if illicit access is achieved, the encryption should make it pretty difficult to crack the actual plain text version.
I went with LastPass as a result of a few online reviews, with the best one by filterjoe.com. There are a few pros and cons to your choice of password manager so it’s up to you to weigh them up and go for it. You can at least get rid of that aged old sticky note under your coffee coaster:)
