While Internet banking websites often use an additional password or some other form of two-factor authentication, meaning that just knowing a username and password from another site will not be enough to break in, plenty of other sites don’t have this additional protection.

Hackers could compromise a website, discovering a list of usernames and passwords, and try them on other sites, such as eBay, Hotmail, social networking sites and others to cause you havoc.

Alternatively, your username and password could be stolen by an unscrupulous Internet café owner, or even what you thought was a friend could try to cause you problems after discovering your username and password.

The simplest solution is to make sure you use a variety of usernames and passwords, or at the very least, different passwords, for different sites that you visit.

But what do you do? Write them all down in a little black book? Get Internet Explorer or Firefox to remember them all for you?

An excellent solution to this problem is a program called Roboform. It is a free program, but in its free version, it only supports 10 ‘passcards’, or the ability to remember the details of 10 websites.

The Pro version supports an unlimited number of passcards, and costs US $29.95. Like the free version, it is also able to automatically fill out web forms for you with all of the appropriate details, such as your name, address, email and much more. Both versions can also generate passwords for you automatically – and strong passwords at that.

It is unfortunate there are no totally free solutions out there, beyond the password remembering functions already inside of Firefox, IE7 and other browsers. But Roboform’s database is easily backed up and restored if your computer crashes (as long as you have made the backup, of course), and does a great deal more than just remembering passwords. And please, don’t accuse me of writing an ad for Roboform. I just happen to think it’s one of the best programs out there for the job.

The ITU has certainly given us all good advice. But it’s advice that many computer users are already well familiar with, even if many have done nothing about it. Roboform is a great way to make the problem of using the same username and password become insignificant.

The only shame is that it costs money – but there aren’t too many good free things in this world, despite a stack of other free programs, operating system and more out there on the Internet today.

Don’t become a victim of identity theft and fraud. If you are a victim, it’ll cost you much more than US $29.95 in time and money to fix.
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