Passwords

"I think the best advice here is to shift you thinking from passwords to passphrases." If you've been on the internet for any meaningful amount of time, then it is very likely that passwords are a bane of your existence. It seems that every website and service wants you to register an account, even for most inane things, and a large reason for that is the ability to log your activity against your account, to make the service more attractive for advertisers.

Unless you've thought about this before, you likely have one or two decentish passwords that you reuse across all the websites and services. At most, you might have a system that you follow which allows you to slightly modify the passwords per site (for example, appending the first three letters of the website's domain to the end of the password). Surely there must be a better way... There is, but it will involve a change to some of your habits. =Why password reuse is a problem= You might be wondering why is reusing passwords such a problem. Surely, there is no problem since you keep the password secret, and it's not like the websites you use can tell the passwords are being reused.

Well, the crux of the issue is that the websites and services have varying degrees of attention to security and commitment to your privacy. Inevitably, what often occurs is that some random low importance website who's developer could not be bothered to implement proper security measures gets hacked and the password database is stolen. Usually, hackers sell those databases to lower level criminals and now anyone who cares to look for it can get a copy of your login details.