How strong is your password?

Passwords have always been important to get right but with more and more information being put online in publicly accessible locations, such as Google docs, are potential security problems. It's likely someone will know your Google email address if you use Gmail. They are left with just getting the password. That effort could be easy to virtually impossible based on the strength of the password being used.

Password Meter is a free tool that will analyze a password for how strong it is as a password. Finding such a service is not that difficult, but Password Meter goes further to explain what aspects of the password it liked and didn't like.

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Password Safe & PasswordMaker

It's no secret that the greatest weakness for most security systems is the user's password. The dilemma is that creating passwords for all the different sites one visits is difficult. Actually, remembering the passwords is more the problem. Password Safe helps solve this problem by securely saving your passwords. This is a free program, so it could be used by your school at no expense. Another system I like is PasswordMaker. It does much the same thing and it has an online version.

This one step can dramatically increase your security to a degree that very few other actions can.

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