Hey all you users of that popular social media application that begins with a ‘T’ and ends with ‘witter’, we suggest you take the time today to make a password change. As mentioned in here, over 50,000 Twitter accounts were compromised earlier this week when corresponding email addresses and passwords were posted to Pastebin. Fortunately, further investigation showed 20,000 of those accounts to be duplicates, spam bots, or inactive users. But that’s not to say that your email address and password isn’t one of the 30,000 active accounts on the list.

So, for safety’s sake, we highly recommend you log in and change that password. Oh, and while you’re at it, you might wanna take the time to think about the best method for password creation (and storage). We recommend using phrases (sentences complete with capitalization, spaces, and punctuation) instead of any letter and number combinations. Using phrases makes it a lot harder for someone to hack your account, and at the same time they’re easier for you to remember. Just make sure you don’t use that phrase for every site or application, and change it every once in awhile.

In case you’re wondering, my Twitter password phrase is Please, hack my account!

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A few months ago, I realized that being a marketing coordinator for Ripple requires signing up for a ton of sites and web apps. And all of those require user names and passwords. Passwords which should be unique to each site. Before my days in IT, I was blissfully ignorant of the dangers of repeating passwords, and had no clue as to how one should go about creating the best password. Luckily, despite my ignorance, I was never the victim of a hacked account or, much worse, identity fraud. Still, I changed my ways once I got the lowdown on password creation from my fellow Ripplers. But now I had to manage all of these long, somewhat forgettable passwords and phrases I use on a daily basis.

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