Often people use obvious passwords online, so if you’ve been using the same one for a long time and it’s just an everyday word, we’d recommend that you’d have a think about changing your password today.
Although we haven’t yet had any reports of anyone’s account being successfully hacked, we have had reports of people having difficulties getting into their VB Forum accounts, being greeted with messages saying that X number of attempts have been made to get into their account when they themselves haven’t tried to login.
Beef-up your password
Even if you haven’t come across this message, the best thing to do is to beef-up your password.
Adding random numerics to your password makes it much harder to guess, especially against automated attacks called ‘Dictionary attacks‘, where words are tried one after the next.
The use of a mixture of Capital and lower case also makes it much harder to guess your password. Giving you something like – 37GreenhAts42
ToughPassword.com – very useful
If you can’t think of a good combination, there’s an excellent Website called Tough Password which will automatically and randomly select you something like – imuH7wgr49GF.
All of this advice also works for any password that you use online.
Image: Bruce Guenter under CC BY 2.0
