Remember the days when you could go out and leave the front door unlocked?

When you could walk to the supermarket without fear of ending up buried in a bathtub full of sand? Unfortunately, those days are no more. These days if you’re going out you better take your stab-vest, and don’t even think about sending your children to the park unsupervised unless they’ve undergone some form of SAS self-defence training. Security, both off and online, are becoming increasingly important.

You wouldn’t go outside with your bank PIN number tattooed on your forehead, so why do the same online? Everybody knows you should have different passwords for all of your web services, and make sure they contain one numerical character and one piece of punctuation or you’ll be hacked and unscrupulous people will buy jacuzzis with your credit card.

Here’s an interesting statistic though – do you know how many people actually practise this kind of digital security? Nobody. Not a single, solitary person on this whole god-forsaken planet actually does that. You’re probably sitting there thinking “But hold on Jon, I have different passwords for my accounts!”, but actually stop and think about that statement for a second. How many of your “different” passwords are just an existing password with a full-stop tacked on the end, or a 1 replacing and L?

I recently went on a security rampage, changing all my passwords to random strings of mumbo-jumbo, and saved them all in a big secure database using KeePass, a desktop password manager. Fantastic, I thought – I’m completely secure, and I sat back in my chair and chuckled quietly at all the imaginary hackers crashing like waves against the impenetrable fortress of my online presence.

The next day I was out and about, and needed to log into my online banking on my laptop. Of course, I didn’t have KeePass on my laptop, and there was no way I could remember the War & Peace-length cypher I had created. I was, in colloquial terms, buggered.

Upon returning home I instantly started researching cloud-based password services, and what I eventually found was PassPack.com. Now you may think what is the point of adding yet another password-protected service to the already huge list – but this one is actually genuinely useful.  There are multiple stages of login – much like you would get with an online bank.  First, a username and password, then a Captcha-style “solve this puzzle” stage to stop horrible hacking scripts, and lastly a “Packing Key”, which is a unique phrase separate from your password. Once you satisfy all of these conditions you’re allowed access to your password list – and as it’s in the cloud it’s easily accessible from just about anywhere.

PassPack do have paid accounts, but you get 100 passwords stored for free.  ”Pah!” I thought, “I’ll never need 100 passwords!”, but I’ve already stored 53 in there – and to think previously I had all of those details locked up inside something as unreliable as my brain!

Other features include secure sharing of passwords (useful for work that requires collaboration such as web design or coding), a whole plethora of anti-hacking securities, and the option to download all your data for backup.

The biggest hurdle to overcome when signing up for a service such as this is the worry that you’re surrendering all of your details to a third party – but in actuality there is very little to worry about. Your data is encrypted to such a high degree that not even government-controlled Chinese hackers would be able to get at it – even PassPack themselves can’t access it.

Know of any similar services? Tell us how they stack up in the comments!

Photo by POD – CC