Earlier this week we asked you to share your techniques for managing and organizing your passwords. Now we’re back to highlight the tools, tricks, and tips you use to wrangle your passwords and internet security.

Photo by Linus Bohman.

The response to our Ask the Readers on Wednesday was prolific; you guys logged hundreds of responses. The responses covered your favorite software, tricks you used to generate passwords without software, and more. Let’s start off by looking at the popular apps you used to manage your key rings.

LastPass, KeePass, and Passes of All Sizes

The majority of you are using a password manager of some sort to manage and organize your passwords. Using an application is a great way to keep track of your passwords as it essentially removes your brain from the entire equation and allows you to assign randomly generated passwords to every single login you use. Rare is the human who could remember 200 logins that were all as random as “&xv$v1oGkuXjs*OBfS79”. The following applications are ordered by the number of times they appeared in your comments.

LastPass: LastPass is a web-based solution that readers, as a whole, absolutely love. It makes good password management incredibly easy. Quite a few of you commented on how you had resisted trying LastPass until you finally gave it a whirl and loved it (this mirrors my own experience of holding out on LastPass only to find out that it was completely awesome when I finally started using it). Gouthaman highlights one of the best things about LastPass:

All my passwords are offered automatically by LastPass when creating an account and they pop-up whenever I need to login. This means that I use a different password for every single web service and yeah, I don’t even remember my Twitter/Facebook/Google password, but my LastPass does!

Kaylin notes that switching to LastPass has overhauled her approach to password security:

LastPass Premium remembers passwords for me. Before that, I had one or two major passwords that I used for most sites. Then I came to realize that method is risky. My LastPass score was only 13 when I started using it, and now I have a much better score because I have changed my habits, thanks to LastPass.

For the curious, Kaylin is referring to the LastPass Security Challenge. LastPass users can take the challenge—which does a local and secure analysis of your passwords—to see how good your password practices are. It scans your password vault and check to see if you’re using varied passwords, multifactor authentication, and the number of passwords you have stored and then assigns a score based off that.

LastPass offers a free service and a premium service that costs $12 per year. You can compare the free and premium services here.

KeePass: Many of you just weren’t comfortable with the idea of syncing your password keyring to the cloud, no matter how well encrypted and tested the mechanism might be. That ruled LastPass out, but made you a prime candidate for KeePass—an open-source password manager with a huge following. KeePass offers nearly all the same basic features that you’ll get with LastPass—random password generation, category-based organization—with just a little more hassle syncing things to your browser. You guys overcame the limitations of KeePass with a variety of hacks and fixes. Dave was one of the many readers who used Dropbox to sync their KeePass database between machines:

KeePass, on Dropbox for access by my several machines. On crucial sites (banking, credit cards, &c.) I use 20+ character gobbledygook passwords generated by KeePass. On many forum-type sites I use the same old user name and password, since the worst that could happen is that someone could post something in my non-recognizable name.

Doc uses KeePass and offers a stern word about using only a handful of simple passwords:

KeePass Portable on my D: drive, with another copy (program & database) on my USB drive…password protected, of course.

To those that use “1 or 2 or 12 passwords for everything”…just wait until an account is hacked and somebody you thought you could trust is rummaging through your bank account and emails. If you’re that lax in keeping your password secure, you’re probably using your birthday, your middle name, etc. to generate all these passwords…and they’re easily cracked. Use uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and some punctuation to generate real random passwords and store them securely! Better yet, change a few of them each week just to be safer. (Just ask Sony how much pain a hacked account can cause!)

Roboform: Although not as popular as LastPass and KeePass—likely due to a very underpowered free option and a fairly high-priced commercial option—RoboForm still had a strong following. It’s available as both a web-based and a desktop-based solution. Robbie offers a solid overview of the service here:

Roboform (now known as Roboform Anywhere).

Has the advantage of automatically (and securely) synchronizing your passwords across all your instances (unlimited).

Has a very nice configurable password generator feature for times when you want maximum security or when you don’t feel like thinking of a new password.

Also lets you attach notes to each login, allowing you to save things like answers to those annoying security questions that you’ll never remember the exact answer several years from now.

If you are using someone else’s computer or don’t want to install Roboform on a particular machine, you can look up your username & password on online.roboform.com.

Roboform comes in three versions Free, Desktop ($30), and Everywhere ($20 per year, $10 for first year). You can compare the versions here.

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