Boy Do I Feel Sheepish

I am not usually a sucker. I pride myself on that. However, yesterday I had a giant red "S" on my forehead when I decided to find out my Twitterank. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Turns out all of Twitterland is abuzz about how anyone who made the same decision I did are now exposed to phishing scams, stolen identities, going home to find their house had been stolen, etc. OK, maybe not THAT bad, but still.
Last night I spent over an hour changing my password for all the sites that shared the same password as Twitter. Maybe I didn't actually need to change all the passwords, but still.
Luckily, the particular password that I used for Twitter wasn't one that was tied to any site that has really personal or financial information. In this day and age, who knows what a person can find out about you from a simple password connected to a seemingly innocuous web application? Who knows if there is anything they can't find out?
In the end, it is a good lesson for us all to change our passwords often. I had been using that particular password for several years. It might be an inconvenience for awhile to force my fingers to move to different characters on my keyboard until I get used to typing the new password, but each time I have to do it, I will remember the near-miss of Twitterank.
If you looked in the mirror yesterday or today to find a big red "S" staring back at you, read more on Adam Ostrow's blog post, or the post by Oliver Mark.

Strong Passwords & Password Security
After my near-miss yesterday, it got me to thinking about password storage and security. I did some searching on the web and found this article from Microsoft on creating strong passwords. About halfway down the article is a link to click to see if your password is considered "strong". There are good tips here for keeping your passwords secure as well.