If like me and most web surfers, you have membership to a rather large number of websites which require a password, you probably have a common password you use for them.

I like to keep a common password for sites I don’t mind if someone finds out the password and unique passwords for the important ones. This may not work for you, but each to their own, but even if you do this and someone gets access to data on a website you use, you will need to change it.

Boards.ie was hacked yesterday, boards.ie “as of April 2009 the site has over 1,000,000 visitors a month, 220,000 registered accounts, more than 1,000,000 threads and more than 15 million posts.” (source: wikipedia)

Imagine being a hacker and having access to everyone’s password! While boards.ie do say on their website “While our investigations indicate that individual user accounts are not in danger we have taken the step of changing all user passwords. “, it is a warning to all surfers, mix it up a bit when it comes to passwords.

I find using symbols and numbers and ‘non words’ is a good idea. But at the end of they day you need to use something that you can REMEMBER, but is hard for others to guess.