I guess all of us have a lot of websites where we login. Our emails(and how may email addresses do we have?), Friendsters and other network websites, Online Forums, Bank websites, and a lot more. And more often than not, we sometimes forget our passwords.
So there is the retrieve or reset password facility where the password is sent to your email address. And sometimes the email address you use has been longtime cancelled already.
To keep things simple, I used to have all my passwords all the same. So I only need to memorize one password. But I know that is not secure since if someone figures out the password of any of the things I login to, they simply try the same password on other things and presto, they're in.
After two recent attacks on my server, I have been taking several security measure that made me come across this software called
Personal Vault.
Personal Vault is a software that stores passwords for you. Although I have heard these types of software before, I never really tried any of them since I did not really trust them nor thing they would help.
But after reading various forums of people maintaining servers. I have seen several postings by various people who likes the software, so I checked it out as well and ended up using it too. These are the features of the software.
1. A storage place of logins and passwords.
2. Can set categories, I use it for categorizing what type of accounts are listed. Like emails, banks, etc.
3. Has a random password generator. I use it every time I replace a password on any of the places I login. They're so random, I do not memorize any of them.
4. Logging in to any of the websites, just simply requires you to open up Personal Vault, click on the account, and there are click to copy the login and the password. Then a Ctrl-V (Paste) on the boxes on the website is done after. Come to think of it, that procedure is even prevents keyloggers to trace the keystrokes of your password.
5. The Personal Vault runs it's own database and it's encrypted. Each file is also password protected, and this is the only password I memorize.
6. You never know when your hardware will crash one day, and it has an export function and can export it to a text file and you can print it out and save the hard copy underground.
7. With a single click you can lock the database file and hide it in the system tray when not in use.
Downside:
1. If you use a computer elsewhere, you do not have personal vault with you. Thus you do not know the passwords. But you can have personal vault installed there too, like at work and keep the personal vault database file in an USB flash drive. Or you ca find your own way of moving the data to your PDA if ever you have one.
2. Personal Vault uses to popular database for security reasons. And uses it's own encrypted database file. I believe it is a flat file. And there is no sorting function so when your accounts become so many, and they are not ordered alphabetically, it can be a pain searching for the account you want to go to.
3. When I downloaded mine, and used it, I was happy it works without me to pay anything. Until I reached 15 accounts, and it then said to pay $15 to use it with more accounts. It was very useful for me, so I paid $15.00 on the website and has been using the software with tons of login account information.
4. This would be very very great if they had a version of this for PalmOS that is synchronizable too via HotSync.
5. I think it only runs on Windows.
The software is made by Day Dream Software and can be downloaded from
http://www.soft1st.com
