Something that affects all of us in both our business and personal lives is password security. As we do more and more online, especially in the payments space, we have to remember an increasing number of passwords. It seems like every week there's another website security breach (and I always wonder about the ones we don't hear about!) which makes it vital to keep everything unique. You really don't want that password from a hacked shopping site letting a malefactor get access to your corporate servers, your bank account or even your Facebook profile - it's not going to end well.
Managing all these IDs and passwords is a huge challenge and the only way to do it in a secure manner is via an encrypted database app. What surprises me is that more businesses don't mandate the storage of passwords securely. Employees are told to keep them secret but how? Relying on human memory is a risky strategy and the result is employees using the same password across multiple applications and quite possibly putting them on Post-it notes!
I've been using 1Password across my iPhone, iPad and Mac for a while now and last week Agilebits released their new version for the Mac - 1Password4. This is a significant upgrade involving a complete rewrite of the code and adding both a new look and new functionality. The app has many great features including prompts to save new passwords when you enter them on websites, a mini mode that sits in the Mac Menubar, browser extensions and my favourite; the Security Audit.
The Security Audit shows you which of your passwords are weak, which are duplicates and which are old enough to merit changing. This analysis is vital in understanding where the weaknesses are in your password inventory.
This quote from the 1Password website sums it up:
Why 1Password? Because your mother's maiden name and your dog's birthday haven’t cut it as a password for a long, long time.
Because reusing passwords has never been a good idea.
Because "secure" and "convenient" never worked together in a sentence until we built 1Password.1Password supports iOS, OSX, Windows and Android although you'll have to wait a little longer for new versions for Windows and Android.
If you do one thing to improve your password security it should be to download an encrypted password storage app and I would suggest it should be 1Password.
