Passwords get your passwords here

An interesting new tactic from Internet thieves. Because so many sites have been broken into and allowed passwords to be taken, there is a good chance that your password and username are being passed around on the Internet. The thieves have found new ways to use this information. If you're one of the unfortunate people who use the same password on every website that you go to, you could indeed be contacted by one of these individuals threatening to destroy your reputation. One person who was contacted by the Internet extortionist was asked to pay over $20,000 to keep the extortionist from destroying his credibility on the Internet because they had managed to hack into his account. Little did they know that the account that they hacked belonged to a professional computer consultant who actually knew more about the systems that the hackers did. After being contacted the hackers and finding out the exact information of what they wanted and how they wanted their $20,000 delivered, he then went on the Internet and put up a webpage offering $20,000 bounty for the culprits arrest and prosecution. It seems that was enough to frighten off the extortionists who contacted him and said they were only an intermediary and that they would make sure that he was never bothered again. Now of course this type of tactic won't work for everybody out there. You need to get out there and make sure that you have fresh passwords on your accounts. If you have not changed your password in several years it may be time to go through and change the password to a new one on any site that requires one, whether you visit regularly or infrequently. There have been people who have broken into Apple accounts and used iTunes accounts that they do not own to buy software. There have been people who have broken into Amazon accounts and charged things to accounts that they do not possess. You really don't want to be the one arguing that you did not make those charges and changing your password is a simple way to prevent such action. I highly recommend that your password be at least eight characters long with at least one capital letter and one number within that eight characters. Don't just think about it, go out and protect yourself. If something funny occurs on your account, be it a charge appears that you did not make or you get word from friends that they got a strange e-mail with your address on it, it may be time to go in and change that password even though you just changed it recently. Waiting around to see if something else happens may indeed make it a lot messier than just changing one password on one e-mail account. Just as a word of warning, please don't use things like your first name and your birth year as a password. It's not going to take people very long to put two and two together and come up with the right answers. However if you were to take your name, capitalize any letter but the first, break the name in two with the birth year and put something else on the beginning - then you have a password that at least stands a chance of not being easily broken. So "rent1954" is not likely to be a great password. Things like "69caLamari34" stand a lot better chance at surviving a password test.