How secure are your passwords?

It seems that these days our lives are filled with passwords and if you're like me trying to remember them all can be difficult, especially if you use different usernames too. More and more the importance of having secure passwords is increasing - hackers are getting smarter and our privacy more important to us.

Think about how you and your business would be affected if someone was to find the password to your website, your email, your banking or your computer. It could be disastrous, and there are plenty of news articles out there about things like this happening all the time.

Now think about your passwords and whether or not you think they're secure. Have you used your dogs name or your birthday or simply the word "password"? If so you might want to consider something that is more obscure and complex.

Last year Time magazine posted an article on the top 25 passwords of 2011.  Here are the top 5. Is yours listed?

1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123

They seem pretty obvious, but people use them.  You can read the full article here and see the top 25 - you'll be amazed (I was surprised to see that I am number 24!).

Many, but not all, websites do force your to have some level of complexity in your passwords, for example they might need to be a certain number of characters long, include an uppercase letter or also include a number, but this doesn't stop you using the same password for everything - this can truly be disastrous if your password got into the wrong hands.

So what is the answer to making password management easy?  Well there are many password management programs out there that help you out.  If for instance use a program called 1Password.  This allows me to store all my passwords in once secure, encrypted database that is locked by a master password. The trick is to ensure that your master password is very secure, but it does mean you only need to remember 1 password.

How programs like 1Password work is that when you visit a website you click an icon in your browsers toolbar and enter your master password. It then populates that website with it's own unique username and password and logs you in.  Simple. It also works on your mobile devices so you have access to your passwords wherever you are.

So a password management program helps with keeping track of your numerous passwords, but how do you come up with so many unique and complex passwords?  Again that's simple. You'll find on the Internet a multitude of websites that are "password generators". These will generate complex, unique and random passwords for you to use, and you can guarantee they'll never appear on the "Top 25 Passwords" list. Here is a link to the password generator that I use.

So give some thought to your passwords and whether or not you think they are secure enough to protect your online information. If not then it might to time to look at changing them and using a password management program, and not like a lot of people do and keep them in a word document or excel spreadsheet!