Password Realization

Having posted at Lifehacker one single time, I was one of the many who had their login information made public as a result of the Gawker hacking.

Smartly, I always use unique and highly obscure (with numbers, symbols, caps, etc) passwords for my highly valuable accounts like banking and Google.

No so wisely, but for ease, I used the same e-mail and password for a lot of other sites and services.

I knew there would come a day that I’d have to fix this.

I got wind of the hack fairly early and prioritized and started changing all of the logins I use regularly and are of high value (like LinkedIn). I’ve even started to close accounts and services I never use anymore–although I don’t think this is 100% safe either as the info is probably never completely purged from their systems. I’ll probably re-prioritize and redo this again at some point.

This was a real eye opener. I probably have hundreds of accounts set up on sites I have long forgotten about, which I signed up out of curiosity and never went back. Of course those don’t have any critical info whatsoever, but still…