Businesses need security even more than personal computer users. We’ve got sensitive financial data from customers; we’ve got more banking sites than consumers, including credit card merchant accounts like American Express Merchant Services — which hates to send a statement by paper. We’ve got customer lists that competitors might like to have. We’ve got business plans that forecast our steps to grow. And so on.

And so passwords are more important to a small business user. Yours are probably not good enough, according to a thoughtful article from the Australian outlet of the popular lifehacker.com Web site.

The only truly secure way to store your passwords is to use a password manager to securely track your passwords, combined with a a great master password to protect the rest of your saved passwords — if you use an easy password for your password manager, it would be easy to crack with a brute force attack. Don’t lure yourself into a false sense of security by just using one — your password manager password should be at least 10 alpha-numeric characters if you really want to be secure.

Five simple rules to make a very complex padlock for your sensitive stuff.

1. More characters are better
2. Words are bad — scramble them
3. Always include special characters like %
4. Upper and lower-case both, please
5. Don’t forget to use numerals, too

Firefox will give you a score on how good your master password is. So will a fine open-source password manager that runs on the Mac, KeePassX. It organizes your passwords by type, lets you look them up and more. Version 0.4 (okay, it’s not a commercial product yet) is free. We’ve tested it on Snow Leopard and it works great. KeePassX will copy any password into your Mac’s clipboard, so you can paste it into a Web site. At some point early in this whole protection process, however, you will need to create a password that unlocks your password manager’s database. This is the only password your manager cannot store, of course. And it’s the last one that you want to forget. Read the rest of this entry »