What’s your password? Shh! Don’t tell me, just think about it for a second. Do you recognize it in this list:

• password
• 123456
• qwerty
• abc123
• letmein
• monkey
• myspace1
• password1
• blink182
• (your username)

If so, please stop reading and go change it (but don’t forget to come back here!)

The list above is the top 10 MySpace passwords according to PC magazine, but if we add in the “Hackers” popular passwords of god, sex, love, and money, there’s a good chance we’ve guessed one of yours.

So why am I talking about passwords? It’s because I just had one of my email accounts cracked. The cracker then used my email account to gain access to other accounts of mine on different websites. All in all, it took a long time to repair what little damage they did; and it would have been a lot harder if I hadn’t caught it before they locked me out of my email account.

Don’t let somebody steal your online accounts. Here’s some tips you can follow to make sure your accounts are secure:

• Don’t use the same login on multiple sites
• Don’t use the same email for all your accounts
• Use different passwords on every site
• Make your passwords secure. If you need help generating one, try this tool (you don’t have to use all 63 characters.) Another great technique is to think of a mnemonic like “four score and seven years ago” and turn in into a password like “4Sa7Ya” (just don’t use that one!)
• Change your passwords at least once a month.
• Don’t give out your passwords to anybody, or any untrusted websites.

I know that secure passwords can be hard to remember, but that’s where Demoxi can help. Passwords stored in Demoxi are stored on your own computer - so there’s less risk of somebody hacking in. They’re also encrypted, so nobody will be able to read them without logging in to your Demoxi account on your computer.

Good luck.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Identity Theft, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.