As a tech person, I use a lot of software utilities. Some of them are esoteric programs that do one thing and few people would care about, but others are so great and generally useful I think everybody should have them. Through the magic of this blog, now I can share my experiences and suggestions. I’ll write about the utilities I find most useful, and to start out, here’s a utility I use nearly every day that you should be using too if you value security: Password Safe.
If you do anything on the internet, you’re going to have passwords. Whether it is an e-commerce site like Amazon.com, a social networking site like Facebook, a blog, a forum…all of these sites are going to require you to set up an account, and that includes a password. Now, if you are like many people, you may take the easy way out and reuse the same password over and over. Bad idea. Malicious criminals are trying to capture your passwords, and when you reuse your passwords, it makes it that much easier to break into all of your accounts (researchers who recently hijacked a malicious botnet found that these botnets could collect upwards of 50,000 passwords per hour, and 28% of people reused passwords on different websites). Using simple passwords like dictionary words is a bad idea too, as they are pretty easily cracked by even unsophisticated crackers.
So what’s the solution? Password Safe. Instead of remembering different passwords for each website, or worse, using the same password over and over, Password Safe will allow you to generate and store unique passwords, saved using a secure encryption algorithm. While that means you will need to choose a secure master password, it’s a lot easier to remember one long password than a bunch of shorter passwords (as well as being more secure). If you aren’t feeling very creating, Password Safe can randomly generate secure passwords that are much, much harder to crack than dictionary words, and can remember a “password history” for an account in case you need to pull up an old password for some reason. It has nice organizational features and can even do “auto-type” for logging onto websites.
Password Safe is small and fast, so it is perfect for sticking on your USB stick. You can use it anywhere you go, and it’s far more portable and more secure, than storing your passwords in your web browser. If the worst happens and somehow one of your passwords gets compromised, since it’s you no longer have to reuse the same password over and over, the damage is much more limited.
Password Safe is so easy to use there’s really no reason not to have it. Best of all, it’s completely free and open-source! The only way it could be better is if it made you breakfast in the morning. Download it and give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.