What’s the best way to manage and store all of my passwords?

SUMMARY

You need a password manager. Get LastPass. It will improve your security by providing you everything you need to make your password virtually hackproof.

WHY?

It seems that almost every day there’s a data breach. That’s because they occur more frequently than you’d think. (Click this link to search for “data breach” in today’s Google News.)

Most of the sites you visit on the Internet requires some sort of user credentials. It may be your email address or username, but you also need a password. It’s challenging to create really good, difficult to guess passwords that are unique. You need a good password to keep your data safe.

Here are a few techniques people use when creating passwords and what’s wrong with them. These people think they’re doing a fairly good job:

1. My password is my son’s name. This is a terrible password. Anybody that knows you will probably know the name of your son and try that password first to see if it works. (I one time helped a co-worker log into her account because she forgot her password. I asked her a few questions. When I got to a question asking if she had any pets, she told me the name of her dog. Voila! We were in.
2. My password is “pencil”. Any word that’s in the dictionary makes for a bad password and you could be subject to a dictionary attack, where words from the dictionary are used by another computer to hack away at your password.
3. I have a good password which is so good I use it on every site I visit. It’s great to have a secure password, but using the same password over and over on different sites is a bad move. If anybody gets hold of your Gmail password, they may try the same password on Amazon or Citibank. It may work, it may not, but eventually they’ll find a site that works and you’ll suddenly find a lot of terrible movies in your Netflix queue.
4. My password has upper/lower case, numbers and symbols. Oh, and it’s 5 digits long. Short passwords are a bad idea, even if they contain all of the things you need to make a great password.A seemingly great password may be t#9Kd, however it would take a computer less than a day to crack this password using a Brute-force attack as there are only 10 billion combinations. That seems like a high number for a person, but to a computer, it’s quite manageable. The computer would try every single password combination possible until it successfully figures out your password. Example: a, aa, ab, ac, ad, ae … zdm, zdn, zdo, zdp, zdq … etc. Eventually, it will work its way up to your password and break in.

We store phone numbers and addresses in a contact list, so why shouldn’t we write down our passwords and store them somewhere? That’s exactly what we need to do, however the “somewhere” is very important. Storing your password list in an easy to read document stored on your computer in a file named “passwords.txt” is not a good idea. What you really need is a password manager.

A password manager will eliminate all of your bad passwords, by generating, encrypting and storing really strong passwords. How about this for a Gmail password: eMP9Tfg8@gd*aWV7j$. Pretty great, huh? This password would take 129942951805 centuries to crack using today’s computing horsepower as the computer must try 8 Nonillion combinations. As an idea of how large this number is, a billion is 10^9 while a nonillion is 10^30. That’s a lot of combinations!

I have been using LastPass for years. LastPass provides a safe place for all of your passwords. You only need to remember one password. The password for LastPass. So make it a good one!

LastPass is accessible from your browser and has some really great features:

• Generate crazy-long, secure passwords
• No need to type your crazy-long passwords. LastPass will detect username and password fields and fill them in automatically.
• Passwords are stored in the cloud, meaning that you can access them from anywhere.
• For $1 a month, you can use LastPass on your smartphone. Totally worth it! The smartphone app also auto-fills form fields!
• Lots more.

But if LastPass has my password list, can’t somebody hack them and get it? LastPass doesn’t actually store your passwords in a readable format. The data is encrypted by your own PC, not LastPass. What this means is that LastPass never actually has any of your passwords. They only have an encrypted version, which must be decrypted with your LastPass password. All the encrypting and decrypting is done locally on your PC. LastPass only gets the data once it’s been encrypted.

With the recent new of the Heartbleed security bug, I really cracked down on my passwords and make them all extremely secure. Without LastPass, this wouldn’t have been possible for me. If you haven’t changed your passwords recently, give LastPass a try. It’s free for use on your PC.

There are other password managers out there but because I’ve been a user of LastPass for so long and because I’ve never had a single issue with it, there’s been no reason for me to look elsewhere. I am one happy customer.

LastPass

• Play Store
• Website

Do I need a To Do list program? I’ve got a calendar, can’t I use that? If not, which To Do list program should I use?

SUMMARY

Yes, get a To Do list program. Specifically, get TickTick – Todo & Task List. While a calendar can do some of the functions that a To Do list provides (set an event, set a time), it doesn’t do everything. You’ll wind up forgetting to do some important things on your list. TickTick provides everything you need to keep track of the things you need to do. It’s very powerful but not overly complex.

WHY?

While I love tracking my calendar, contacts, etc. on my Android device, I’ve never committed to using a To Do list, even when I first started using the PalmPilot Pro in 1997. To Do list programs were either not powerful enough, too powerful or overly complex. I also didn’t want to remember to launch yet another program every day to see what’s on the schedule.

I tried hard to manage my to do’s with the calendar. The problem is that calendars are designed to do specific things on specific days. You can set an alarm but if you’re not ready to commit to doing the task, you’ll either snooze the alarm over and over, or you’ll cancel the alarm. If you cancel, the event stays put on the calendar, and when tomorrow rolls around, the to do item is out of site (and out of mind) on yesterday’s calendar.

A To Do list manager is really the best tool for the job. When looking at the choices, the following are important to me:

• Simple to use: I don’t want too many options. If there was too much to do, I wouldn’t want to use it.
• Attractive interface: I want the interface to be attractive and well thought out.
• Ability to share: I want to share my To Do list with wife as well as our Nanny so that we can all keep track of what needs to be done for the house and kids.
• Doesn’t cost a fortune: I don’t mind paying money to support a developer, but I don’t want the cost to use the app to be cost prohibitive, especially if all the users I want to share with have to pay.
• Access through a browser: In addition to being able to create content and access it through my phone, sometimes it is easier to enter large volumes of data at a desktop computer. Plus, you can get access to your data from anywhere, even if your phone battery is dead.
• Reminders that aren’t annoying: I understand that a To Do list’s job is to be sure that you get things done, but I don’t want to be harassed by the program that’s helping me to organize.
• Easy to postpone and reschedule items: When the alarm goes off to do a To Do item, you’re not always ready to get it done. It is  very important for items to be easily rescheduled.
• Ability to set a To Do for a specific time on a day: I’m not only interested in doing an item on Tuesday, but sometimes I need to be reminded at 3:oopm on Tuesday.
• Not interested in project management: Some To Do list options give way more functionality than I need, such as: Setting time estimates, assigning resources, etc. I’m not interested in this type of control simply to run a household.

I tried many options. First I tried all of the top To Do list apps in the Google Play Store, including:

• Wunderlist
• Todoist
• GTasks: Ties in with Google Tasks, a huge plus, but it didn’t provide everything I need.
• Tasks Free: Also ties in with Google Tasks but not strong enough.
• Any.Do: Beautiful app and one I really, really wanted to like.

I then tried other apps that I thought could do the job:

• Google Keep: Rats. It doesn’t handle To Do’s, so it’s out.
• Evernote: While I use this program to store notes, it just didn’t make the cut for managing my To Do’s.

Finally, I tried created my own Google Sheets spreadsheet. This actually worked fairly well, but it wouldn’t have provided alarms and the filtering that’s available through the desktop browser didn’t show up on the device app. As a result, it would have been impossible to filter and sort the list properly.

I didn’t try TickTick until after all of the above options and I was shocked to see that it did everything I need, and more! I like supporting developers, plus sharing with 2 people requires a Pro account, so I upgraded without hesitation. I was concerned that each person accessing the To Do list I created would need to upgrade, but that wasn’t the case. Money wells spent and highly recommended! It’s been a few months now and it I couldn’t live without TickTick.

Honorable Mention

I wanted to track my To Do’s from work at well, but I didn’t want to mix business with pleasure. Also, I use Outlook with Microsoft Exchange. Outlook already has a To Do function built-in, so I wanted to see if I could find something that would sync with it.

I discovered Tasks & Notes which fit the bill perfectly and does what I need to track work To Do’s. My personal To Do’s are now separate from my work To Do’s and having the list sync up with Exchange is really great! In addition, Tasks & Notes has a nice Android Widget which lets me see at-a-glance what I’ve got to do. Super handy!

TickTick

• Play Store
• Website

Tasks & Notes

• Play Store