Online Password Strategies

Most all of us are quite lazy with our online passwords. However, it only takes once before this laziness results in online disaster when it comes to protecting your identity and/or online accounts. The most common approaches from least secure to most secure:

1. I use the same password for every site that I sign-up, no exceptions.


2. I have a couple of passwords that I use between sites.  One for online shopping and banking and another for all of the rest.


3. I have multiple passwords that I use across multiple sites and I try to make the passwords very strong.


4. Every site that I am required to have a password, I use different passwords that are nearly impossible to 'crack'.

Which category do you fall in? The truth for most people is they would fall into the first two categories above.  Needless to say, the first two strategies are considered to be weak when it comes to protecting your online accounts.  But how practical is managing multiple passwords for multiple accounts?

Fortunately, there are some helpful bits of technology that can streamline our password management life.

A free option is called LastPass.  Basically, LastPass will remember all of your passwords for you and can generate strong passwords for each online account you maintain.

Another option and one that I like is 1Password.  1Password does essentially the same thing that LastPass does but also has the ability to synchronize password across multiple devices such as iPhone and iPad.

UPDATE: I just learned of another web-based solution called passpack. The strength of passpack appears to be in the ability to share accounts/passwords with anyone you chose like a spouse. If you check it out, let me know how you like it in the comments below.

Comments

[indierhythm]

Michael, your timing is great. I've been meaning to ask you about your recommendations with this as I know I'm doing a more than poor job here and I keep hearing horror stories about how people get into trouble with bad password management. Thank you!

[Michael]

Thanks for the feedback indierhythm -- Let us know if you begin to use LastPass or 1Password and give us your thoughts!

[Steve]

Passwords can be an enormous pain, so I have taken steps to record and or hide them in secure places - these are better solutions. Thanks CS.

[Glenda]

I have been horrible at using different and secure passwords. Thank you for a better solution.

[Amy]

Great advice! After reading this, one of my top 5 resolutions for the New Year just bacame setting up an account as you recommend. With free time at a minimum, it is so easy to shop online but scary at the same time. I look forward to peace of mind as I shop and run errands in cyberspace.

[Crissy]

A neat little trick my brother-in-law taught me is to use a pretty obscure but easy to remember "base password" and then add part of the website's name to the "base password" which creates site-specific passwords that are easy to remember. Like this:
base = W1tW1mH (Where in the Word is my Husband -- replacing 'i' with the number 1 because they look the same)
website = yahoo.com - first 2 letters = "ya"

So my password would be W1tW1mHya (base plus first two letters of site)

Password for Amazon.com would be: W1tW1mHam

[[ Note: this is NOT the actual password base I use!! ]]