Can I see a raise of hand if you use the same password on more than one website? Oh you even use the same password on all websites? Terrible!

Have you ever considered what the consequences will be if a rouge web developer attempts to use that same password you used to register on his website to login to your email? It could be worse.

The problem is that there are numerous websites out there and though I could say use random passwords, you’ll soon have to use the password recovery utility on every website you have an account on as you wouldn’t be able to remember all the passwords.

One solution, is to use a password manager. I’ll personally recommend KeePass – which is a utility that enables you to generate and/or store your passwords securely. It has a number of good security features that even helps to mitigate the activity of key loggers, perhaps they are installed on your system.

Alternatively, I will suggest the use of an online utility like Hashapass. The reason I’m excited about this is because it allows you to use a password you remember and combines this with some other information (e.g. the domain name like cnn.com) to generate a hash that can then be used as a password to the site.

If you had an account on say gmail.com, and you used a master password of say jackass, entering in this information into the Hashapass generator will generate the password: y/NTQTnm. Not bad hmm? yahoo.com as the parameter generates DyPh7Z5d. Completely random and very difficult to guess. All you need to remember is your master password. Better still, the bookmarklet will even make it easier to use the service without having to first visit the website.