A dangerously high amount of people reuse the same password for most if not all of their web logins. Some people do not realize just how dangerous of a practice this is while others understand the risk and do so anyway due to the difficulty of remembering multiple passwords.

The reason this practice is so dangerous is if a password is used for more than one purpose and it is compromised then that password could allow attackers into your various other accounts.

An example that you may have heard of in the news recently is that even a company as large as Yahoo did in fact lose EVERY single password for every user of the service. Imagine a scenario where you used the same password for your bank, Facebook, Netflix, and Google accounts. Now and attacker can go to every large service and retry your password and now they have a good chance of getting into your accounts. If they manage to get into your email account they will just start resetting the passwords of every other account you have and in short order can take over your digital life.

By the way a good password looks something like this;

cIk&0lC2$sOW6$NPEUCbb$9E

Not a combo of your name and a year (not that any of you do that).

The way to have a unique password for each site is to use a password manager and then you only have to remember the password for the password manager. I for example have 100’s of passwords but I only know two of them, my computer login and my password manager login.

I use LastPass and it is fantastic and cross platform but a little geeky. If you use Apple products the built in password manager in Apple Safari and Keychain work well enough.

PS: Wherever possible use 2-Factor Authentication! Even if your password is compromised this requires an attacker to also have access to your phone or dongle to get the authentication code. This will help prevent most attacks. By using unique passwords everywhere with 2-factor authentication you have drastically reduced your risk to account hacking.