Password Management for the Legal Office

Our IT department was recently asked to recommend a password management program best suited for the legal office; a security-conscious environment with multiple users accessing dozens of internal and external password-protected sites on a daily basis.

Sure, an admin manager can assign one strong word per site, but that's not very secure. We've also heard of firms maintaining their passwords in employee-access-only Excel files. Timewise, that's not a good solution as one would have to refer to the Excel file for the password upon each site visit. Conceivably, the admin manager can set up a hash system, but as more and more site log-ins require boutique passwords (e.g., a password containing 6 - 14 characters, one of which must be a digit and one each upper and lower cases digit), this system quickly becomes unmanageable.

Roboform. It really works and works great. It is a program that remembers all of your passwords for each Web site. For instance, for Lexis, when you site-in, it asks for your ID and password, if you enter your information, RoboForm will pop up asking if you want to save this information. You click yes. The next time you go to Lexis, RoboForm automatically pops up asking if you want to fill in the information and it submits it for you. There is a free trial which allows you to keep up to 10 passwords. The program itself is $29.99/tracking an unlimited number of passwords. It will even generate a random password for you if you want.

RoboForm also keeps track of your personal information and credit card numbers, if you want it to. So should you decide to buy something on the Web, it will fill in all those forms for you.

You can secure RoboForm from anyone else using your computer as you can require a password for it to open and operate. This way, all you have to remember is that one RoboForm password and RF does the rest.

Stay safe,

Jonathan Caspian
Writer, Beacon Bulletin
CIO, Beacon Network Investigations, Inc.