By Jin Nan Goto

The difficulty with choosing a strong, secure password is remembering that password in the future. Many people overcome the difficulty and inconvenience of remembering by choosing short and easy passwords.  It’s not all that surprising that the most commonly used passwords are ‘123456’ and ‘password’.  Other bad passwords include simple patterns ‘qwerty’, names ‘michael’, common words ‘monkey’ and sports team names ‘redskins’. Before choosing a password you may want to consider checking the list linked below to make sure your password is not one of the “500 worst passwords”. Note: some people think they are very clever when picking crude and inappropriate words as their bad passwords, so don’t follow the link if you are offended by that kind of language.

http://www.whatsmypass.com/category/password-info

The second thing people do to overcome the inconvenience of remembering long passwords is to reuse the password for multiple sites. If your password is compromised on one site, then it is compromised on every other site the password is used.  One of the key vulnerablilties in the recent twitter hack was a actually not a “hack” but a Twitter employee who reused their password.

The Solution:

“It’s ok to write down your passwords”. While you can simply keep a text file with all your passwords on your computer, there is also software that can remember those super-strong passwords for you.  They range from the open source keepass (http://keepass.info/) to commercial solutions such as RoboForm (http://www.roboform.com/) and every modern browser will offer to remember passwords.