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How To Manage Your Username And Password The Easy And Secure WayJerry Yu Have been an Internet user for more than 9 years, I have 100s of logins and passwords to keep. Im paranoid. Im now even more paranoid after I joined YMMSS because I use online payment systems on weekly basis if not daily. I used to use Microsoft Excel to manage my usernames, passwords, and other registration information, both online and offline. Excel is not safe because there are programs to crack password protected Excel workbooks and I even cracked the spreadsheet and VBA source code password for one of my old Excel financial models I developed. Today I still use Excel to store some personal information but I only save the Excel file on my another PC that is not connected to Internet. In my article "6 Essential Steps to Protect Your Computer On the Internet", I highly recommended the award winning RoboForm. Free version of RoboForm http://www.roboform.com does come with limitations such as 10 Passcards only. If you dont want to buy the Pro version costs $29.99 as of my writing, there is an easy-to-use freeware see below you can download right now and manage unlimited usernames and passwords. Download freeware Password Safe from SourceForge.net - the Open Source community. https://sourceforge.net/projects/passwordsafe/ Here are some great features of Password Safe:
Here are some tips of using Password Safe version 2.04 and managing password in general. Tip #1 - Always create a strong master password Safe Combination as used in the software. Strong password should meet the following criteria:
Tip #2 - Let PasswordSafe generate random password for you. To generate random password:
The generated random password is constructed according to the password policy defined in Password Safe. You can modify the default policy.
Some sites only allow alphanumeric passwords so make sure you select the appropriate check boxes when this is the case. Tip #3 - Very Important: Never type your master password when open PasswordSafe. Keylogger spyware can record keystrokes. How can you enter master password without typing I do this. Step 1: Open a Notepad file .txt. Step 2: Copy and paste an article from any Internet website to this .txt file. Step 3: Select characters from this article and copy, paste to form your master password. Tip #4 - Very Important: Never lose your master password. I memorize my master password. In addition, I also physically write it down to a hand written study material that has my previous uni works. Among the 1,000s of words, I placed my 22 characters master password in two different pages in encrypted format that can let me derive my master password. Tip #5 - Categorize username and password. When you add a new entry, you need to specify Group, Title, Username, Password, and Notes. The entries that share the same Group name will be gathered together automatically. One Group can contain another Group as its sub Group. For example, I have Email Address group which contains three sub-groups as Friend, Work, Family. Tip #6 - For security reasons, always use Copy Username to Clipboard and Copy Password to Clipboard. Remember, never type username and password on a web form. This is how to do it.
You can use mouse to do copy and paste. If you prefer short-cut keys, this is how. Copy: Ctrl+C Paste: Ctrl+V Tip #7 - Use "Browse to URL" rather than typing URL in browser address bar. When you enter a new entry or edit an existing one, you can enter a URL must start with http:// in the Notes field. You can save website login pages URL in this field. When you need to open a login page in browser, right click the entry and click Browse to URL in the pop-up menu. Then the login page will be opened in your default web browser automatically. Tip #8 - Dont forget to backup your password database file. Use the Make Backup menu item to save a second copy of your password file. Tip #9 - Store your backups in a different offline computer or location. This is a widely used backup strategy. If you dont have two computers, you need to use other storage media to save a second copy of your backup file and version them by date easy to track back. Other storage media can be zip drive, thumb drive, floppy disk, CD, etc. Off site backups are also important. Dont overlook this. You lose all your data if you lose both your computer and your other storage media all together for any reason. Many companies provide online storage services for a fee. You can store any digital files you should password protect these files first on their secure servers. Search Google and you will find a lot. I have two computers. One is used to surf net and it does not have any sensitive info stored on it. Another one is for my development work not connected to Internet and it has my backup files. I also store my backups in a thumb drive and CDs sometimes.
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