Pick a password that’s impossible to remember, but don’t write it down. Say what? And use a different, impossible to remember password for every site. There’s no way. So what happens? If you’re like I was, you use the same password for everything, cleverly substituting numbers for letters, or maybe adding an exclamation point. Good luck with that. Some day soon, one of those sites WILL get hacked, and you’ll have to go to all the other sites and change your password.
LastPass frees you from all that. It even frees you from typing them in (especially helpful for the elderly or disabled). Set it up with a master password, and it will enter all your passwords automatically. It will even generate nearly uncrackable passwords for you, and then remember them. If you get nervous, it will let you go back look up all these passwords and see what they are. Put it on all your browsers and it will cost you … nothing. It’s free. It also fills in forms for you with your address and credit card numbers.
Better yet, spend $25 to get a YubiKey and another $12 a year for LastPass Premium and you’ll have the ultimate in security. The Yubikey is a little device for your keychain that generates a unique password each time, that you plug into a USB port. LastPass Premium lets you use LastPass on your smartphone; that alone is worth $1 a month. It makes a great gift, especially for someone you feel might be a little more vulnerable to being hacked than the rest of us.
LastPass also has an export feature, in case you want to switch to something else or just know that you can down the road. Try it – remember, it’s free, and see how you like liberation from worrying about passwords.