Lastpass is a cloud website that advertises itself as the last password you’ll ever need. Well what do you do when the site crashes? Lastpass went down last night and is still not up as I write this. They took themselves offline when they saw a lot of unexplained traffic that they thought might indicate that they were being hacked. After a while you could get local access to your passwords and manually enter them, but if you have a lot of them you’ll discover that the right one is hard to find as they may be stored under an unfamiliar name and may exist in different iterations.
What you need in this case is a separate and up to date list of sites and passwords that, of course, defeats the reason for Lastpass’s existence. If you are a user of the service you will likely think seriously of discontinuing this service. To be of value Lastpass must be 100% reliable which it obviously is not. After a little thinking you may wonder if putting all your passwords on a remote site was a good idea. It won’t take long to realize that despite its utility Lastpass is a lousy idea.
A workable, but less convenient, solution is to keep a list of passwords on your computer heavily encrypted with TrueCrypt or its like. You can then email yourself the encrypted file and thus have it available wherever you go. Truecrypt is free and once you get the hang of it, easy to use. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned it’s adios to Lastpass.
Give them their last rites!