My sister-in-law’s online email account was hacked recently, and now everyone on her mailing list is getting vast quantities of incredibly annoying spam. She’s not the only one—apparently some [choose your own derogatory adjective] [choose your own insulting noun] decided that we all needed more useless email. (Does anyone actually buy from spam emails?)
In any case, it turned out that her password was too easy to figure out, at least for a computer with a lot of time on its “hands.” This led to a discussion about how to pick a good password. Here is what my very knowledgeable husband had to say:
- A GOOD password is easy to remember, hard to guess
- Change it regularly, but not so often that you can’t remember all the passwords you need to know (which usually means both current and recent ones)
- Never write it down. If you have to write it, it’s either too complicated to remember or you have too many passwords to remember.