P is for password

Let me see. Was it mom or was it God. No, neither of those were correct. Now I remember, it must be either sex or money. This is what it can sound like when you try to access an account that you have not accessed in a while and you do not remember the password. Having over four dozens passwords myself, I realize that this can be a problem. As always, there are options that you can take advantage of to keep your passwords reasonable secure and easily accessible.
I say reasonable secure because given enough time it is possible for any password to become compromised. Some steps that we can take to decrease the likelihood of such an event are simple and painless. You probably have at least a dozen passwords to remember yourself. They can include everything from the code for your voicemail box to the passwords for email accounts.
The first thing that you should do is to prioritize your accounts in order of importance. You can give easily recalled passwords to accounts that contain very little personal or business information about you. If anyone ever accessed them, it would not be a big deal. Next, you would want to increase the complexity of your passwords for accounts that contain information that is more sensitive. The way that you make passwords more secure is by increasing both the number and type of characters used in the password composition instead of using common passwords like money, sex, God, or mom. You can construct a password phrase that incorporates numbers and symbols. An example of this is the phrase “ninety percent of people are over three feet”. This could be written “9D%ofPpoleRovr3fEeT”. Here you have extended the character content and utilized multiple cases.
It may seem difficult to remember that many phrases for all of your accounts. Well, it is. Luckily, we don’t have to. This is when we download or buy password manager software. Password manager software is also known as password safes, and sometimes come with a password generator that will randomly produce passwords for you. Anyway, this software will store all of your passwords for you in one location and you only need to remember one password to access all of your other account passwords. You may now be thinking that this doesn’t make any sense because all that someone needs to do is find out the password for your manager. The answer to this is to buy a removable USB drive, also called a pen or thumb drive, and load the software on it. That way you can move it from computer to computer and no one else can access it unless you leave it in your USB port. It would also be a good idea to make a backup. Some places to look for free password manager software are cygnuproductions.com and moonsoftware.com or you could check your favorite software store for commercial password manager software.