One of the worst things that one experience in there internet life is someone stole your passwords, change it to some other and you cannot access your own inbox/account ! What a mishap. In this new era of fast computing, high speed broadband and portable handheld devices makes stole once private information easily. Many peoples including celebrities, bloggers and business people reported password hack in there accounts. I found one website which tells how strong your password is and how much time it to take to hack it using a variety of computer resources. From the site I learned that a good programmer having a beast computer can hack anyones password easily. So You want to keep it in a better way. Protecting passwords (even its meant for protection !) securely for a long time is a crucial issue, then think of a situation where you password is open to all- just click away.
I am going to tell about some situations where we commonly ignored or forget to hide our privacy information from other users when we are using browsers. I had an experience in the last week. In my laptop I installed Chrome, firefox, IE, opera and safari browsers, but I regularly use chrome browser, which appears more faster than others. I occasionally use the new firefox -which is also faster in its new edition. When I first I opened by gmail inbox in firefox, I noticed the option to save my password. As I am the lone user of the laptop, I allowed to store my passwords in firefox browser, so I can easily login to my inbox in my next visits. Things suddenly changed when one of my roommate started to use the laptop when I left open it for few minutes. When he opened the gmail account, my username and password was automatically detected and directly went to inbox, then he suddenly realized the fact, he closed the account and informed me about the matter.
Then I realized the problem of keeping passwords in the browser and I decided to remove it. I just opened the ‘options’ from the menu. To my surprise I noticed a saved password button under the security tab, when I clicked it, it opened the ‘saved passwords’ box. There I noticed all of my saved passwords and usernames and found another button ‘Show passwords’, it simply shows all of my saved passwords before me!
This is a simple case of lack of knowledge on a tool in which I don’t have enough experience.I am sure you people may know these things. But this experience taught me to explore some better way to store my passwords, protect in from hackers, and securely delete it from memorizing forms.
So, let’s start from the firefox, here in the above case how can you protect the password from showing to visitors or unknown users.
Step 1 : Password Protect sensitive information with a master password.
To enable master password protection open the ‘option’, tick the ‘use a master password’ option then a screen is displayed like below, which is also equiped with a password quality meter which shows how difficult is your password to hack. It is advisable to use numbers, symbols and use different type of words (never use words available in dictionary which can hack easily using dictionary hack method and password not be an easily guessable one). You can easily get the idea from the password quality meter that how difficult to hack password when you included symbols and numbers in your password. Please remember the password should be an easily remember one for you.
Step 2 : Password protect user profiles
To protect your firefox profile use the add-on Profile password for firefox. You can find similar add-ons from the add-ons list.
If you are using public computer, when the firefox ask for saving the password, select the ‘never save password for this site’ option and keep manually entering password in each time. Firefox has an option ‘Private Browsing’ – which allows you to browse the internet without saving any information about which site’s and pages you visited. But, private browser feature does not make you anonymous, your internet service provider and others can still track the pages you visit. Tou can select private browsing from the main menu by clicking start private browsing you can use the shortcut “ctrl+shift+P”. You can also stop private browsing using the same method.
