Looking for a good Password manager or security tool

I keep information like that in a password protected .rar, with a good password it's a waste of time for someone to try cracking. Winrar is free, so it's a good solution on the free side.

Another way of doing it is a memory trick, for example
Your "master" passord is 5eccURe!
then for sites such as overclock you would either add or subsuttude the same letters all the time (maybe 1 3 5) to make it become
OeecCRe!

Esay to remember and as long as you chose a good master password your good to go

KeePass, mate! It's free!

Free and very good. Great auto-type functionality. You an also store files in the protected database (at least I think so, I haven't done that). You can combine 3 ways of securing the database - password, user account and a file.

It also includes a password generator, which in combination with the auto-type, allows you to have unique passwords per service and have the passwords very complicated.
Stuff like 5eccURe! is hard to remember - was it 5 in plase of S or 3 in place of E? Was it capital R or was it capital C etc. while it's very easy to crack because it's short and uses common substitutions which only adds like 2 bits of entropy.

With KeePass you only have to come up with and remember one strong password, if you choose that way of locking the database. And pass phrases are much better than passwords, because you can easily remember something like Jcoast5Is4The3Ultimate2Sex1Master while it's very hard to crack, about 146 bits strong.

Then you have the passwords for the sites, banks etc. generated like this:
Þk%5yäÅ¿ðzB÷ÚºØd or Ë 'U³EN¿µù*{ÅøÑÉ

Good luck cracking that. That's 171 bits strong. That's 2¹⁷¹ combinations and I can't even imagine how many millions of years it would take to crack with a powerful machine. The only way your password will be compromised if is the site where you use it is hacked and the hash gets broken (not that easy too) or the site stores it in plain text (which still happens). But then you just delete that password and you don't have to worry, because you passwords, aside from being awesome, are also unique, so that one compromised password can't do any more damage than that one site.


Edited by wlw wl - 7/26/12 at 2:59am

I also use Lastpass (Free version), and it works great.

However it won't protect you if you still use the same passwords over different websites, if you do that, you may want to change the password on important sites to something unique.

My passwords for games are all the same, since I have to type it to login. (My greatest weakness, however if my game accounts get hacked, its relatively unimportant.)

My password for misc sites are randomly generated via Lastpass. (So if a database is hacked, these passwords can't be used anywhere else)
My password for Email and Paypal are unique, but easy to remember (in sentence form)

Things you may want to keep in mind:
These days the type of password you use doesn't really matter, since people rarly bruteforce anymore. Your password doesn't matter if the site you enter it into doesn't use a hashed/salted database. Thus unique passwords for every website are more important then a secure password.

KeePass' auto-type works for Origin/Steam, and in place where you would not be able to use it, you can always double-click a password to copy it into the clipboard for a couple of seconds, then it's erased. Maybe Last Pass can do that too?

I tried pasting passwords, and found out that most of my game clients don't support pasting. I don't consider it a big problem though, there is nothing to be gained from hacking my games, so I assume they won't be targeted.