I read an article on Mashable – Gmail Tries to Help Users Avoid Phishing Scams

There are just too many passwords to remember. I have three levels one simple, that I don’t care about. It’s 8 characters, but I only use it to secure stuff I don’t care if people get, or if some website may be a phishing scheme.

Everyone has to have a password strategy. I was working at a company where I was supposed to remember passwords for 12 different systems. Each had a different set of rules. Some had to be at least 6 characters, Others had to be 8 characters. Some had to have numbers and one Upper case. None of them at that time required special characters. But many of them required to reset the password every so often. Some were every month, some where quarterly, and some never had to be changed.

That is where I started formulating a password strategy. I started with a standard password. It was only six characters long and all letters. When they started requiring Upper case and number I would capitalize the first character. And then when they started requiring numbers i would use the month. at the end. But even with those tactics I would forget and have to try a couple of times to get it right. Sometimes I would get locked out because I couldn’t remember.

One of my friends was a network engineer and he suggested a program called Keepass it has it’s own master password to get in. The site says don’t forget the password because there is no way to recover it. Good for them.

I have been using this to save my passwords ever since. Their is a Mac/Linux version KeePassX The also have version for iphone, blackberry, pocketpc and others. all which can be reached from other downloads

One of the cool things about this program is that it will generate passwords for you. I use this feature now all the time.

I now have over 300 different passwords stored.

I have gmail remind me to back it up every week. The file is small enough to email it to myself. And I don’t worry about security because my password for that is 20 characters consisting of upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. It’s too long to type anywhere else. it’s just a combination of a couple my favorite passwords combined so it’s not too hard to type and easy to remember.

Good luck as you pursue your password strategy