Years ago, before the advent of the two-step verification, when I did not use a password manager like KeyPass, I was in the habit of forgetting the login credentials of many websites. And then I used to take the usual route of password recovery which basically sends an email containing your password or username or both. I often copy-pasted this password in the email message to the login screen and the password stayed in the clipboard for as long as the Windows PC was running. In a situation like this, just about anybody can steal such sensitive information from the clipboard.
In fact when some of the professional hackers target someone’s PC, the clipboard is the first of the few things they check for something useful. And since the clipboard can contain anything from simple text, image or files – you should always clear the clipboard after copy-pasting anything sensitive or private.
Manually, it is very easy to erase the contents of the clipboard – all you have to do is just overwrite the clipboard with something else. So just copy anything into the clipboard and it is done. But what if you cannot remember to clear the clipboard. This is where a small utility called ClipTTL might help you.
ClipTTL is an unobtrusive little tool that keeps erasing the contents of your Windows’ clipboard after a set time of twenty seconds. It has no options and no user interface – nothing except a system tray icon that can be used to shutdown the ClipTTL when not needed.
By default, ClipTTL runs the clipboard cleaning mechanism after every 20 seconds. If this is too small a time duration for you, then you can specify your own time frequency by invoking the ClipTTL with a parameter containing the number of seconds after which you want the clipboard to be cleared.
For example, if you run ClipTTL with a command line clipttl.exe 120 then it will flush the Clipboard after every 120 seconds. It would have been better if this functionality (to choose a custom time period) was given in the system tray right-click menu.
Verdict: ClipTTL stays out of the way and keeps on cleaning the clipboard contents repeatedly until you choose to shut this tool down. It is a nifty little program to boost your privacy in a Windows PC.
You can download ClipTTL from https://www.trustprobe.com/fs1/apps.html.