Keeping your data safe should be a perennial New Year’s resolution.

Data thieves are after you, and there’s no shortage of nasty programs such as ransomware and crypto-mining malware that can make life miserable. In short, you’ll want to protect your computer and mobile devices, not to mention cloud-stored information.

For most people security means passwords, and I’m a fan of dedicated password programs. (I’ve previously recommended LastPass as a good password manager, and it still is).

Dashlane (www.dashlane.com) is a new password manager that is getting a lot of attention. It runs on all desktops, tablets, and on iOS and Android with all syncing to your central account. It has a free version that handles up to 50 passwords if you want to check it out, but the best value is Premium Dashlane. For $4.99 per month it gives you unlimited passwords and devices but also includes a Virtual Private Network and Dark Web Monitoring.

VPNs and Dark Web Monitoring will be discussed in the next few months, but now we will deal with basic password tools. Accounts now require complex passwords. This tempts us to memorize one password and use it on multiple occasions.

Dashlane can help with that security problem. Its password generator is one of the best I’ve seen for creating a new password and assigning it to the account while recording it in your Dashlane vault.

It also monitors all of your passwords and reminds you how many are duplicates and weak. The nicest feature is that with one button it will change all those inadequate passwords and update them. Even if you don’t have the nerve to push that button at first, it is nice to know that it is there.

One of Dashlane’s best features is that it allows you to surf the web without constantly having to stop when you come to a site that asks you for a login/pw. Dashlane will automatically add those components. What a breath of fresh air.

For Windows machines my colleague Rob Kay looked at Kaspersky Total Security 2019. Long a big name in the anti-virus space, the company got some bad press regarding a purported association with the Russian government. To date there’s no proof of this, and despite the controversy we think the product is solid.

In fact, Kaspersky Total Security 2019 (usa.kaspersky.com) has received glowing reviews in the trade publications, and we believe it’s excellent for a home office with multiple devices. It includes eight major options: Scan, Database Update, Safe Money, Password Manager, Privacy Protection, Backup and Restore, Parental Control and My Kaspersky (which you’ll need to add more devices).

The key feature is Scan, which will do scans of your computer’s drive, external drives or just individual folders. Kaspersky has one of the best anti-virus detection engines in the business, and the results from testing houses illustrate this.

If you dig a little deeper, by clicking the More tools link at the bottom of the primary dashboard, you’ll see there’s much more to this program. This section of Kaspersky Total Security includes categories such as Security, My Network, Manage Applications, Data Protection, Clean and Optimize, and Reports.

For example, the next time you sit at Starbucks, activating My Network will ensure that Kaspersky will encrypt traffic over unsecured public Wi-Fi connections.

You’d think with all this security protection your machine would bog down, but the Kaspersky suite had no apparent impact on our system’s performance. In fact, Rob’s tablet actually ran faster with Kaspersky installed.

Overall, he found Kaspersky Total Security easy to use, and the dashboard makes it easy to understand.

In short, Kaspersky Total Security is a first-class anti-virus suite. It’s well engineered, offers a ton of practical features and roots out malware like a bloodhound.

Total Security 2019 costs $50 for up to five devices for a single year for new subscribers, and $75 for 10 devices.

Mike Meyer is chief information officer for Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.