Secure yourself by using secure habits (like locking your screen when you're away) and using strong passwords and then storing them somewhere. A determined att

Secure yourself by using secure habits (like locking your screen when you're away) and using strong passwords and then storing them somewhere. A determined attacker with physical access to your system is basically impossible to stop. There are a myriad of ways they can figure out your password or log your keystrokes or memory to find it. I feel that the real value in passwords is in securing network communications. In that case you simply need to be sure the protocol is secure and does not send the password over the wire (or air) in plain text or an easily extractable format. The chance of someone trying to brute force your online accounts or sniffing your network traffic is much more likely than someone sneaking into your office and booting your desktop from a live CD. So I would rather have a very strong network password and a reasonably weak password manager passwords than not store my passwords and thus feel the pressure to make my online passwords easy to remember.