With our world becoming more and more "connected", most people have many online usernames & passwords for various social networking, news, shopping, banking & other services.

Many of the people that I speak to still do one or all of the following:

1. Write down their passwords or store them in a file on their computer
2. Remember one password and use the same one everywhere.  Often this password is very weak and involves pets or partners names!
3. Accept their browsers' offers to remember passwords.

Now I know that we're all human and very very busy and can't be bothered thinking about this but it is not good practice!!  Please stop now!  It's very dangerous and one day it will very likely happen that your password will be discovered and, if you're unlucky, possibly used against you.  Shudder to think of the damage that could be done to your finances and your reputation.

What to do instead?  Use a password manager!  What's a password manager I hear you ask?  Well it's a little program that stores all of your usernames & passwords securely so that they can only be accessed by the manager itself, or by authorised browser plugins, or by you, with a single master password.

Which password manager?  There are a number out there, but I've only used 2 of them personally.

1. Keepass.  I've been using keepass for a few years, and while it was very good & I got on very very well with it, one feature that it lacks (at the time of writing) is the ability to access the vault from multiple computers or locations.  But it's free & works well (once you've figured out the somewhat cryptic installation instructions) so I recommend it for anyone who's only got one computer & never wants to access passwords from any other devices or locations.
2. LastPass. I switched to LastPass in January after getting frustrated with not being able to login to anything on other computers, or my iPad.  Working around this problem was causing me to frequently revert to No. 2 of the silly mistakes above.  You create an online account, but the passwords themselves are not stored online, they're stored on your computer in an encrypted form which can only be unlocked with your own password.  So it's secure as long as you logout when you leave your computer.  That's really important!  There are browser plugins available that autofill login forms for you, and this is very handy, save your usernames & passwords as you type them in.  It also scans your computer for unsecured passwords stored in browsers (it won't find the text file you're keeping though so delete that, as well as any reminder emails).  I've been getting on very well with the Firefox plugin but there are plugins available for the other browsers too, just follow the instructions on the website.  Go to LastPass now & get secure!  Please!