Protect your password

Over the weekend a site called Gawker, I confess I've never heard of it, was hacked and account details of over a million users were published.  That includes their passwords.

Because people are inclined to use the same password for several different accounts, there has been quite a chain effect and Twitter accounts have been compromised.  Amazingly, the most common password among the Gawker users was 123456 followed by password and 12345678. 

Apart from not using the same password for different accounts, there are other important lessons we can learn:

• Don't use an easily guessed password such as "123456" or "password".
• Do use a mixture of upper case, lower case, numbers and other characters.
• Don't use a word that can be found in a dictionary.
• Don't use the same password everywhere.
• Don't use personal information such as your name or date of birth.

It's only a year or so since passwords were collected and published in a very similar way, and that time the very same passwords turned out to be the most commonly used.

This video, I think, is good at explaining how to set up something more secure.