OK...with my recent entry into the world of internet marketing, I've found that I have more username/password combos than I can shake a stick at: forums my own dbs on various servers various BANS sites emails etc. It seems that I add two or three login/pwd combos a day to the long list of tools that I use. My brain can't handle it. I'm considering just good ol' fashioned ink and paper and just writing down new ones every day. Not very sortable/searchable, but I'd feel like it's more secure than anything online. (Some of these would even be bank numbers, etc.) Is there a safe, searchable way to electronically keep a list of all my accesses?
Thanks! That looks great. However, I should have been more specific. I need to be able to access my password list from multiple machines in various locations. That means I was thinking of something that could be hosted on my web server. Which is with GoDaddy. So I'd need something that could be secure from prying eyes at GoDaddy so I'm not vulnerable to some unscrupulous employee there. Does that make sense? Does such a thing even exist, or does putting it on a server pretty much make it vulnerable?
You might be able to find a mobile phone application to do this for you -- what kind of phone do you have?
Understand, you want an online service that can help you manage your passwords. Do NOT host your passwords yourself, it is much more dangerous than you thought. Use a TRUSTY service. Personally, I use google notebook store some of my password, google notebook is not a professional password manager, the reason why I use it is I trust google and trust google's security technology.
Agreed. Security is hard. Even if you stored them in a text file on your server and encrypted it, you would have to decrypt the passwords to view them. So, for the time you would be able see them, they would be in plain text in RAM and any unscrupulous employee would be able to see them too. Pen and paper is actually a reasonably good method if you're smart about it. Don't put the usernames and passwords together. Make sure that someone who found your piece of paper would have trouble using it. If you can, encode the passwords within some sort of simple code. Maybe add extra letters in positions only you know or scramble the letters up in a way that's easy to de-scramble. Lock the piece of paper in your filing cabinet or drawer. These aren't cryptographically secure techniques but they are often enough that even if someone broke into your house and your filing cabinet and stole the piece of paper, they'd still have to do some work before they could log in as you. Don't forget to have a backup piece of paper somewhere else... if someone did steal your only copy, you'd be screwed. Unfortunately, all of this doesn't really solve your actual problem of having access to all of them over the internet. Maybe you could post a very long article... maybe even a novel... and choose your password by grabbing all the letters in the 7th to 17th rows of the third column of page 26. You can encode that password as "7, 17, 3, 26" and as long as you can remember those four numbers and you have access to the internet then you can figure out your password. There would be plenty of variations, such as every second letter or moving diagonally, or going backwards from bottom to top. You could always try memory tricks to just remember your passwords better. Use a whole line from a song (not the first line) including all the punctuation. But be careful not to hum the tune when typing in your password... Make a sentence about something you can visualise and use the first letters from each word in the sentence or even use the whole sentence ! Then all you have to do to remember the password is visualise the scene that the sentence describes.
I think another good way is store your password using a password manager (e.g. keepass), and host the file/database (*.kdb for keepass) on your server. Even if others can get the password file, it is encrypted. Every time when you need the password file, download it to local, and use keepass to open it.