You should never reuse a pass­word. That means a dif­fer­ent pass­word for every com­puter and web­site ac­count you have. If you’re like me, that means over 100 dif­fer­ent pass­words to keep track of. There are two so­lu­tions to this prob­lem:

  1. Use the same pass­word every­where.
  2. Use a pass­word man­ager.

Option 1 is bad bad bad. A chain is only as strong as it’s weak­est link: if you use the same pass­word every­where, then a hacker only has to break into one site (the least se­cure) and they now have ac­cess to your email, bank, and credit cards.

Using a pass­word man­ager is much more se­cure. I use KeePass. All of my pass­words are stored in KeePass, which re­quires a mas­ter pass­word to ac­cess. Now I just have to re­mem­ber one pass­word. To keep it backed up and to use it on all my de­vices, I store my KeePass data­base in Dropbox.

To make it eas­ier to en­ter pass­words into web­sites, I use chromeIPass, which au­to­mat­i­cally fills the user­name and pass­word fields when you open a web page.

To make the mo­bile ex­pe­ri­ence eas­ier, I use KeePass2Android. This works sim­i­larly to chromeIPass: you share the URL with KeePass2Android, which then pops up a no­ti­fi­ca­tion which al­lows you to eas­ily copy and paste the user­name and pass­word into the web­site.

KeePass is a solid open-source pro­ject that is pro­vid­ing free se­cu­rity to tens of thou­sands of peo­ple. That’s why KeePass was my July cre­ator do­na­tion, and KeePass2Android was my May cre­ator do­na­tion.