For just about everything you do on the web, you need to supply a password. In the past I used two passwords; one for really important sites like banking and another for everything else. I certainly couldn't remember many more than that and the way I figured it was that if my important sites got hacked I was in big trouble and for all the other stuff at least my bank account couldn't be plundered. Of course I tried to make them difficult to guess by including numbers and special characters but that doesn't help a bit if one of the sites on which I used that shared, secure password gets hacked and the password is stolen - all common sites can then be accessed. It doesn't matter that the hacker doesn't know which sites I've got accounts for, they can try 1,000 sites (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+/Gmail, PInterest and so on) with the same email address/username and password combination very quickly and automatically. So when we discovered LastPass, we changed all our passwords and made everything much more secure.

So what does LastPass do? Simply, it manages all your usernames and passwords for everything you need to log on to. Everything is encrypted and saved to the cloud so you can access that data any time, anywhere on any device. To unencrypt the data, you need to provide your one solitary, secure password and everything is decrypted locally so your passwords are never sent across the internet except of course when you want to log in to a site. This makes it very secure (of course you need to have good, up-to-date anti-virus software on the devices you use).

Installation is easy and free unless you want to share passwords with other people. You can add it to the majority of browsers on your PC, iDevice or android phone, so when you visit a site it will fill in your username and password automatically so you can sign straight in. The first time you visit a site you need to log in to, LastPass won't have the details of course. Log in and LastPass asks if you want to save your password, say yes! Once you're logged in, change your password using LastPass' password generator and it will then ask you to update your password for the site. Easy.

LastPass also has some great advanced features for the premium user which is a pitance at 12USD / user / year. One big draw for us and LastPass is that we share a number of passwords internally so any of our staff (with access rights to the password) can log in to a site. You can even set it up so that an administrator can update the password but a user can't see the password but can still sign in!

Finally, LastPass was secure against the recent Heartbleed OpenSSL bug so we didn't need to worry about that.

If you're interested in this, simply visit the LastPass website and download it. If you want to try out the premium feature, the team at LastPass have offered a free 6 months trial for all our clients.