By now, you've heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. There's a good chance you ignore them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Even complex passwords are getting easy to break if they're too short. That's because today's inexpensive computer chips have the power of supercomputers from the year 2000.
Weak passwords are a crook's best friend. Make yours long and complex, and change them often - not just on your bank account but on your email and social media, too.
Updating passwords and changing them all the time is something I'm involved in.
I suspect I am like most people on the Internet in that I sign up for all sorts of sites and frequently use the same passwords.
Choosing a hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember password is important!
Some journal writers choose to password-protect their site, which is either an incredibly responsible act or a paranoid one.
I'm a Luddite with computers, and I'm slightly worried about being hacked as well.
Suppose a bad guy guesses the password for your throwaway Yahoo address. Now he goes to major banking and commerce sites and looks for an account registered to that email address. When he finds one, he clicks the 'forgot my password' button and a new one is sent - to your compromised email account. Now he's in a position to do you serious harm.
If someone hacks your password, you can change it - as many times as you want.
Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.