I ran across this article while browsing Google News. I found it quite intesting that people used such weak passwords. I mean, I expect that passwords would be somewhat weak, but I can't believe that so many people would use passwords such as 123456. I mean, I expect that passwords would be simple, but not Spaceballs simple.

I've been a happy user of Password Safe for many years. Basically, it lets you keep all you passwords stored behind a master password. This lets you pick hard to guess passwords, and allows you to use a different password at every site. I highly recommend using this or some other tool to store your passwords, and using strong passwords for you online accounts.

I am kind of curious about the whole thing. If they were using proper salting and hashing, then they wouldn't be able to tell what the people were using for their passwords. Unless they were trying to brute force the accounts of their own customers, which I guess could be possible.