Review: Steganos Password Manager 2009 security software

In today's online world of logins, passwords, registrations and online banking, it's more important than ever to guard passwords and login details to prevent fraud.

Users should also make sure that their computers are protected well enough against hackers, both of which Steganos Password Manager 2009 can help with.

The software, as the name suggests, manages the user's passwords by storing the address, username and password information for any website, and in future it enters this information automatically to save having to remember all the passwords.

It can also help generate unique, secure passwords for new websites and it keeps all of this information in a database that is protected with a single master password (obviously, you'll need to remember that one yourself).

Adding new sites was easy – we entered the username and password as normal into the web page, then right-clicked one of the fields to automatically make a new entry in our Password Manager profile for that site.

You can add multiple profiles for different categories of website, and even transfer these to a USB memory key for use on another computer or to use on a handheld computer on the move.

This part of the process worked pretty well, and though it might take time to populate the database with each site to which you want access, there's definite convenience and peace of mind here once that's done.

In addition to password control the software can also be used to store information such as addresses, credit card details and phone numbers.

This isn't integrated quite as well, since you'll need to drag and drop each bit of information from the relevant part of the software into the online form, but for information that's difficult to remember, such as a credit card number, it should save some time.

Everything is securely encrypted within the software and kept safe from hackers looking to retrieve these sorts of details from the computer. It will certainly come in handy for users frustrated at having to remember all those passwords, but it's not much more powerful than the password manager that's included for no cost in the Firefox web browser, for instance.