When is the last time you changed your passwords...to everything...I mean all of them!

I'm sure some of you have shared passwords with various entities for one reason or another just "because you have to" to get things done.

It may have been a telephone support person, it may have been your computer guy, it may have been a family member or any other number of people.

It could also be that your password is not actually that hard to guess and, sooner or later, as long it remains in use by you, the likelihood of it being cracked increases.

It could be that your password, you know, the same one you use for everything, was just emailed back to you in plain text from some web site you just subscribed to...that is bad by the way!

Have you just had a dispute with someone who may know your passwords? Then it is time to change them quick smart!

Sometimes systems force you to use short and poor passwords. If that is the case then change them more often and don't store anything important or valuable with that system or entity.

The longer your password and the more it includes variations such as numbers, capitalization, special characters and such the less likely it is to be "guessed" by humans or password cracking software.

Of course, most of us will have many passwords for many things these days.

I usually designate a week or a month "password change time" so that whenever I visit a site or system I know to change the password (as opposed to trying to track them all down in one go).

It is a pain, but less painful than the alternatives.