Everything About Passwords – a Guide to Managing Online Personas

PasswordsThere is one cool joke that the worst nightmare of a web hacker is that he suddenly forgets all his passwords. Password fatigue (or password chaos or identity chaos) is the feeling experienced by many people who are required to remember and manage a lot of passwords.

And how many passwords do you need to keep in your head? I am sure as an Internet marketer, blogger and/or active social media user you must have quite a few passwords to manage.

This post will attempt to make your life easier or at least to encourage you to take it easier…

Creating a Good Password

These are plenty naturally. Most will just generate a random combination of letters and numbers which will be impossible to remember. Others are more fun, they generate passwords based on some criteria you specify.

One of such tools generating memory-friendly passwords is PasswordBird which creates passwords based on your (favorite) second and last names and (your date of birth):

Password generator

Facts: How Good Is Your Password?

1. This table shows the approximate amount of time required for a computer or a cluster of computers to guess various passwords. The figures shown are approximate and are the maximum time required to guess any password.

How much time required to break a password

2. The following infographic visualizes the “breakability” of some of the popular passwords based on their strength – it might appear a little funny but lot of people are actually using those simple passwords (via):

Secure passwords

3. There are also a few tools that help you measure the “strength” of your password: here’s one of them called Password Meter that checks how strong your password is based on the combination of the following criteria:

  • Number of characters;
  • Number of uppercase letters and lowercase letters;
  • Numbers and symbols;
  • Repeat characters;
  • Consecutive uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers;

Password checker

Password Manager

Many people recommend LastPass, KeePass and Roboform.

As FireFox junkie, I am using a FireFox plugin for that (which probably is not really secure or..?). The plugin is Sxipper and I find it awesome and easy to use.

Sxipper claims to protect your personal data by keeping it secure on your computer and retrieving it for you when you choose to share it online. Besides, Sxipper recognizes OpenID forms and helps you manage your OpenIDs.

Immediately after the installation, the tool will offer you to import all your passwords in it:

Sxipper

After importing (or entering manually) your personal data in Sxipper, go to any page containing a login form and you’ll be able to select the username under which you want to login:

Sxipper

The tool has a plenty more options and features you can read about here including persona management, disposable email address, form auto-filling, etc.

Post img by by azrainman

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