A few years back I had the misfortune of having some of my online accounts hacked into. Someone didn’t like me very much so they thought it would be funny to take over 10 of my accounts. Fortunately the accounts were fairly unimportant, they were only for forums, yahoo, and a few other sites.
They got in because I used weak passwords. Oh what a mistake that was. It took almost a year to get most of my accounts back, and I still have yet to gain access to one of them.
Now, just think about that for a second.
Just imagine what would happen if someone got into your blog, bank account, e-mail, heck even your adwords account. They could cause some pretty serious damage. You won’t ever have that problem if you practice basic security techniques and use a secure password.
Heck, why have only one? I use around 6 passwords. 3 of them I use for very important sites (bank, paypal, etc), 2 of them are for other sites (Digg, blogs, etc) and the last one is for “iffy” sites. I also keep track of all of my online accounts. Whenever I sign up with a new one I write the name and URL down and toss the paper in a safe place.
About twice per year I go through the list and come up with some new passwords and slowly change my accounts over to use them. Ever since I started doing this rotation schedule 2 years ago I have yet to have any problems whatsoever.
Even if you decide to use the same password for everything, a secure password is always a better choice than something weak like “Bob”, “password”, or “count”.
Useful Links:
SecurityStats.com password strength tester
Blog Herald article on choosing blog passwords
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May 10th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
what a scary thought of someone taking over your accounts. my whole life is online. Fortunately, I don’t use my very important site (bank, etc) passwords on any other sites. But I had never thought of someone taking over email accounts and such. What is the world coming to!
May 10th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Then there is also the added threat of brute force attacks against blogs, that happened to ProBlogger a few months ago.
At least I got back at the punk who got into my accounts. I had his e-mail (it was someone I knew from a forum) and I sent him a nice “surprise”
A few days later he was on the forum complaining about a virus he got… I still have no clue what he was talking about 
heh