Use strong passwords! If not you are asking for it.

Password strength is incredibly important! Having worked in the Tech industry for years I have seen so many servers get rooted, hacked and owned simply by a bruteforce attack or password guess. Realistically this should not be a problem but many people feel that passwords such as “password”  “hellokitty” or whatever is strong enough. Generally as a guideline you will want a mixed lower case, upper case, alpha numeric passwords with special characters. An example of such a password is below:

U$34r341P4$$W0rdN00b13t!!

The key characteristics of a strong password are in this password above and this can be used as a guideline. Yes they are harder to remember but almost impossible to guess through a brute force. An example of what ignorance about password strength can do is in this article below:

http://news.techworld.com/security/3210769/users-on-hacked-site-used-trivial-passwords/?olo=rss

290,000 accounts were hijacked on this website. If that doesn’t hit home I don’t know what will. Keeping a strong password not only keeps you safe but also keeps others safe from you.  In case you want a autgenerated password, you can use something like this: http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/ – this will do it for you