In the wake of this mind blowing Heartbleed bug that has the entire world coddling naked in a corner, it’s time for everyone to do a little Internet housekeeping and general security maintenance. I won’t try and explain the bug, others have explained Heartbleed way better than I can. You can’t worry if you were affected by it, you just need to look into it and act accordingly.

As for making your online lives a little safer and easier, LastPass is here to help you with your password management. You access hundreds of sites with “hundreds” of usernames and passwords and I’m going to go out on a limb and say you use the same password for most of them. Good job. When you’re compromised on a little non critical utility site like Wunderlist, someone will be able to steal your entire identity from your important social sites to your bank accounts. You need some type of password management. Everyone’s furious about NSA spying but I bet most people are completely careless about locking up their own “doors”. Get LastPass now. Just do it. Use the link I posted above and we both get a free month of LastPass Premium.

Sure, LastPass may be a bit of work to get set up however once you’re established with it, it’s completely seamless and you only remember it’s there when you’re creating an account for yet another new website. You get on your computer, log into LastPass for that session through a plug-in in your browser and don’t have remember another password the rest of your time on the computer. This is how it is now. You’ll be joining websites for the rest of your life. I’ll say it again, you need some type of password management.

I can’t remember, nor do I want to even imagine, what life was like before I started using LastPass. Nevermind, I can remember. I was using my browser to store my passwords so that anyone who accessed my computer could open up my browser, go into my settings and see all my passwords. That was cool.

If you go premium, you get access to apps that will help you manage your passwords from your mobile devices. I have never gone premium so I cannot vouch for them however I do know you can access your LastPass vault from a mobile browser and pull the passwords from there for free. Sure it’s not as seamless and can be a hassle at times but if you don’t think you really need a mobile feature that often and don’t want to pony up $1 a month, it is an option. I know for the amount of times I’ve used the mobile browser since I started using LastPass years ago that I don’t particularly need an app but it would probably be nice.

And back to the Heartbleed for a moment. LastPass has a good looking Heartbleed Tester which you should most definitely check out. If you have their service, they have an even better integrated Heartbleed test if you go into your vault and run a Security Check on the left side of the page. It’ll tell you exactly where you were effected and what passwords you need to change and when.