Do You Need To Change Your Password?

Being careful about passwords should be a priority, said Dale Dixon, president of the Better Business Bureau Serving Southeast Idaho and Eastern Oregon.

?We have seen, over and over again, that if you don?t change your password in a timely fashion, there?s somebody out there who?s going to figure out how to hack into your system,? Dixon said Thursday. ?I was in the hub of an Internet security place, and they had screens ? it was like a set of 24. ? And I looked up at one screen. It was the biggest screen in the room, and there (were) all of these bars and graphs ? a lot of activity. And I said, ?What is that?? And they said, ?We are monitoring all the attempts to hack into our ? Internet system. ??

He said the attacks were coming from all over the world, adding that there are networks of computers that ?do nothing but sit there all day trying to hack in using user names and passwords in all variety.?

?This shows why it?s so important to have good passwords,? he said.

SplashData, an Internet security firm, recently published its list of most-hacked passwords.

Here are the top 10, beginning with the most hacked:

1. password

2. 123456

3. 12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

Dixon said he knows of one Idaho Falls company that uses one of these passwords (No. 8).

He said if you want a secure password, have one that is at least eight characters long and have a combination of letters (upper and lower case), numbers and punctuation marks. He added that a password should be changed about every three months, and that the same password should not be used for various accounts.