Whenever I sign up to a new website these days, be it for shopping, for work, for emails whatever, it is starting to seem impossible to get away with entering my normal passwords. I shouldn’t declare this on the Internet but I am sure that most people probably use the same 2-3 passwords in rotation. I know that this is a big no no and doesn’t exactly keep us safe from cyber thief’s but I do not have the memory of an Elephant and don’t want to have use different passwords for my hundreds of accounts. 
Using the same passwords is beginning to cause issues. Most websites now want you to enter X amount of numbers and use a mixture of upper and lowercase letters. There is also the whole issue with answering the security questions. The security questions are where most hackers can access your account thus rendering your passwords useless. So what’s the point of the whole upper lower case thing in the first place?!?
I often find myself going onto a website, entering my password and getting denied as somehow it is not what I thought. I then have to have an email sent to me to reset my password. The new password is often a confusing one as it is now not allowed to be the same as the last and of course I forget to write it down. Next time I visit the website I cant remember what on earth I changed it to and have to repeat the whole process. It’s a vicious circle.
There is so much of our personal and sensitive information on the Internet these days, I understand how annoying having different passwords is but it has to happen to prevent hackers.
You’re probably thinking, well why don’t you just write them down? I tried this method but then the problem was that I would write them down on bits of paper that I had handy at that exact minute. I would then come to find said piece of paper and then the next thing I know the paper vanished. Been eaten by the paper monster…you know the one, it eats all those scrap papers you thought you put in a safe place, along with your passport, bank documents and other things that always seem to disappear (or maybe its just me)
Realizing that writing passwords down on paper wasn’t the smartest or safest thing to do I started to write them down in a word document. The whole thing just got messy and confusing. It was also time consuming with having to create my own boxes, ‘aint nobody got time for that’. It then came to me. Something I use everyday for projects…drum roll please….Microsoft Excel.
Excel , so simple, so premade and organized. Perfect. I organized my passwords into categories such as Social Media, Shopping, Work, Emails etc etc with color coding, making everything easy to find. I also locked the document with a password (this one I can remember) to make sure that no one else can open it. Now every time I set up a new account I can enter all the information here. No more forgotten or lost passwords!
It’s not the most convenient method but it’s a simple one that suffices. There really is no easy answer to passwords. Even MIT technology review admits passwords are getting to be a problem. Especially in the business community. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/424436/no-easy-answers-to-password-problems/
Perhaps the answer of the future will be biometrics? Apple’s new Iphone 5s has already enabled this technology with fingerprint phone unlocking.
http://www.tested.com/tech/web/457460-are-biometrics-future-passwords/
Perhaps one day we will look back and wonder how on earth we coped with all these passwords. It will be like trying to remember how the business world coped without emails, online conferences and social media! Until the future is here we will just have to handle our passwords the best we can.
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