Have you been hacked recently ?

Some time ago I published a news article on this blog about how insecure many people’s passwords were found to be, after reading a number of articles on the subject, in an attempt to highlight the importance of the issue to my clients and other blog visitors.

It amazed me to hear at the time that regardless of all the warnings you see, so many people were still using passwords like “123456” or even “password” which can literally be cracked in a few seconds !

This weekend, I read another article in a trade journal where they had again looked at this topic and low and behold, it seems that the situation has changed very little !

I have heard reports from a number of my clients and other people over the last few months alone that they have had accounts hacked (I believe that they were mostly hotmail accounts) and spam was subsequently sent from them. In each case, the problem was identified quite quickly and rectified so they did not become major problems but at least one resulted in the hotmail account being suspended until it was fixed.

The article I read today mentioned a useful website where you can check how secure your passwords are and it tells you how quickly they can be cracked so it is quite an eye opener. Give it a try at http://howsecureismypassword.net – I’m sure you will be shocked !