Nick Moeck

In today's world, everyone has numerous online accounts. Your email is likely a web-based service, you probably have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and you probably do your banking online. If you're a photographer, you probably have an account on Flickr. And these are just some the most common web services. The average person has dozens of online accounts.

With all of those accounts, it can be a pain to remember all of your passwords. Many people resort to writing their passwords down, either on paper or in a text document on their computer, but this can be just as much of a pain, and it's extremely insecure - all it takes is someone finding your "hidden" list of passwords and they have access to your bank account, your Facebook, your email, your entire life. It can be tempting to use just one or two different passwords so that you don't have to memorize dozens of different passwords, but with how shockingly common it is for websites like Last.fm, LinkedIn, and eHarmony to have their users' passwords compromised, using one or two different passwords leaves you wide open to having all of your accounts compromised.

This is where a password management program comes in. What is a password management program? Simply put, it’s a program that allows you to store all of your website and application passwords, and easily login to your favorite services. It allows you to use unique, long, hard to guess passwords for everything (it can generate them for you, or you can easily enter your own if you already have different passwords for all of your accounts), without using the same password everywhere, and without requiring you to memorize anything.

I've personally evaluated a number of password management programs, and the one that sticks out to me as being a cut above the rest is KeePassX. I’ve chosen KeePassX for a few reasons. I use Ubuntu on all of my computers (actually, more specifically, I use Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with KDE instead of GNOME). The Linux version of KeePassX uses the Qt application framework, so it integrates nicely into my system, and it’s available in the Ubuntu repositories, making it very easy to install. There are Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry versions of KeePass available, and your password database can be used by all of these versions, making it very easy to have access to your passwords, whether you're in the office, at home, or on the go. Your password database is also encrypted, so if someone gets a hold of your database, it's useless to them without your master password. Personally, I sync my password database to my Android phone, which allows me to take my passwords with me wherever I go.

The most important feature of KeePassX for me, however, is the ability for it to automatically type my username and password. When I need to log in, all I have to do is press a simple keyboard shortcut. The shortcut is user-definable, so you can set it to whatever key combination works best for you - I use Ctrl+Shift+z, since those keys are easy for me to press all at once. KeePassX even takes care of hitting the "Login" button for you, so it puts you just a quick keyboard combination away from logging into your favorite websites.

KeePassX makes it extremely easy to keep your important online accounts safe. There's absolutely no reason to fall into the bad habits of reusing passwords or writing them down. It could mean the difference between having your bank account drained or your identity stolen because your password from an entirely unrelated website was exposed, and being safe and secure.