Can someone recommend a good password management system?
I am wondering if anyone can recommend a good password management system, which would allow me to store personal passwords and also client login details (eg. ftp info).
Cheers.
Check out LastPass (http://www.lastpass.com) - it was recommended to me during a SANS security course, and I have been quite happy with it.
I too would recommend LastPass, and I've been their subscriber for many years which allows you to sync the password across different platforms (mainly phone & tablet). It is encrypted both locally and remotely, so even if your computer or their server is compromised, without your passphrase the password can still nto be decoded.
Hi Ivana, I have tried but couldnt find any software which could manage passwords. I usually keep all in an excel.The browsers usually asks you to save passwords when you login for first time. There some softwares which offer to save passwords from your chrome or firefox browsers but the question is should these be trusted?
Thanks Apurv ... the problem with Excel is that it's not very secure. But thanks for trying.
I'm a fan of 1Password which works great on our Mac and iPhones, I think they have a solution for Windows also. Password data is stored in your Dropbox so can be easily but securely accessed from a few devices.
We also use it to store purchased software serial numbers, i'm sure it would cope with FTP details too. We currently use Transmit SFTP client for storing this.
Hope that helps.
That's great. Thanks Dave. I will check out 1Password.
I've used KeePass successfully for some years. High level of encryption and straight forward to use across multiple devices. Basic version is free.
Thank you Richard. I will check it out. I am still trying to decide.
A geek friend of mine recently referred me to a terrifying article on how easy passwords are to crack, even after encryption. "...a self-admitted newbie to password cracking, downloaded a list of more than 16,000 cryptographically hashed passcodes. Within a few hours, he deciphered almost half of them."
The basic problem is that humans create passwords with patterns. Random passwords created by a password manager are much safer. So I'm about to change!
There's an article here http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/the-secret-to-online-safety-lies-random-characters-and-a-password-manager/ which I'm using as a reference and which may be helpful to others too.
And the original scary article is here http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/ If you can face the level of technicality - as I said, my friend IS a geek!
Hi Bridget. Thanks for the links. It is really scary what hackers can do ... that's why I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle passwords.
Ivana Katz, Owner at Websites 4 Small Business
Thanks Adam. I came across that yesterday and wondered if it was any good. I might give it a shot if it's working well for you. Cheers.