Five years ago, things were straight-forward on the web – you often had just the one password to store for your email account. Nowadays though it’s not unusual to have 10 or 20 passwords created for countless online services that you’re a customer of. And what happens? Lots of people tend to utilise the very same password for all or nearly all the services they’ve signed up to. Some people may not think their Twitter account as being hugely vital, but it is if you’re utilising the very same password for that as you are for your WorldPay account. Of course, it’s handy to only have to remember just one password, but what if an individual gets hold of that single password? That’s right, they in theory have their mitts on all of the servives you’ve signed up to that share that very same password. If you think they don’t know the other services you’ve signed up to, it isn’t essential. They launch programs which test tens of thousands of services and try to match your account name/password pairing that they already have.

This is an issue we all have to address, but it is rather easily solved. The truth is, it’s not required to store every account name/password. Let your browser do it. Be it your MySpace login or Email password. Ask your browser to store each username/password, and then have a master password just in case an individual else gets physical access to your computer. If they do have such access, they must type in the master password in order to login to any of your services. In other words, you can join dozens of web services, and just have to remember one password : your master password for your browser.

When creating passwords, make them random and long, for example X4563Jde34 which is a variety of numbers, lower and upper case characters. Since it’s not required to remember them yourself, be as obscure as you like. A word of warning : don’t use normal words as your password, as these are effortless to discover for 3rd parties.