Great article here about poorly chosen passwords. I tend to stay away from simply relinking URLs that I find, but I think this one merits some attention. I recall when I was studying my tail off in college trying to learn everything about computers, especially security, that passwords were a rather common topic. The recommendation then was to use as a password difficult enough to not be guessed but still simple enough to be remembered. I'm pretty sure that advice fell on deaf ears as frankly it's pretty tough to do.

Any more I recommend using as long a string of random characters as possible. Mash on your keyboard if you have to, but also consider a random password generator. How will I remember that, you might ask. Don't. Use a password safe. Then all you have to do is remember one password. The rest are kept in a vault for easy access. And if you can't remember your master password, write it down and keep it in your wallet. Somebody steals that, well you've got bigger problems.

Once you adopt this new technique, you'll use passwords differently. Instead of reusing the same one, possibly with variations, you'll generate a completely different one for every website. Remember the old saying about keeping all your eggs in one basket? Once in a while at work we'll have accounts compromised because the user had the exact same password everywhere and some spammer nabbed it and then hijacked their email account to send spam. Sounds crazy, but you definitely do not want that to be you.

And while you're at it, stop using 6 letter passwords. It's all random and you'll just copy and paste it anyway, so why not go for broke? I routinely use 24 character passwords. It actually makes me smile to think of how ridiculous my password would seem to a snooper.