Passwords Again

I spent the afternoon working with colleagues on a project involving a learning management system.  We are coming off summer break and most of the participants had not logged in for three months.  A few of them had forgotten their passwords.

Many got right in because they use the same password for this system as for all systems – university email, yahoo email, calendar, online grade book, student course registration, online banking and that account on the server used to send everyone holiday greeting cards. 

With the number of services requiring a password, no one can know how many times a generic password can circle the earth and hit servers that should never be trusted with “secret” information.  On a typical day I use accounts at Protopage, Slashdot, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Google plus all my work related sites.  I use a web-based password generator to create strong passwords and Roboform to keep track of all of them. 

With all the identity theft going on, using an assortment of strong passwords just seems obvious to me.