And yet many people do an astonishingly bad job of selecting secure passwords.
The book rightly recommends forcing users to mix uppercase and lowercase characters, digits and punctuation characters to create more secure passwords.
Then, assuming you've set a password, you'll have to type that in, and secure passwords are rarely fun on virtual keyboards.
Folks: if your accounts and your personal data matter to you, use truly secure passwords and back up your content.
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The solution, say security researchers, is to upgrade the software in people's heads, by teaching them to choose more secure passwords (see article).
There are precautions such as implementing secure passwords, network security awareness, exercising discernment with applications, monitoring accounts, and locking devices that all consumers should do on their own.
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It can compromise secure transactions and passwords, make computers vulnerable to hackers, disable anti-virus software and distribute potentially confidential e-mails.
In parallel, define a security architecture and migration strategy that provides security through browsers, Secure Sockets Layer and passwords in the short run, and gets you started on PKI by deploying technologies such as IP Security virtual private networks and the Secure Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions e-mail standard.
It urged users to take measures to keep their accounts secure by not sharing their passwords and using strong passwords.
"What I learned was by allowing people to go online - put passwords into a secure system so that they can see what was being recorded about them - it's led them to regain that trust between ourselves and the patients, " he said.
Every cyber-criminal dreams about users on unsecured Wi-Fi networks, typing passwords into non-secure websites, and visiting domains that may not be encrypted.
"One password is much more secure than having 50 different IDs and passwords, " says Grimes.
Dr Naor thinks that computerised versions of his method could have widespread applications in areas such as banking, where the secure exchange of information requires the comparison of passwords.
Bowes, a consultant with Dash9 security and a developer for security scanning tool NMap, says he collected the passwords to help researchers figure out how users choose passwords and make the authentication process more secure.
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Another criticism of RRP is that it uses passwords to identify registrars instead of the more secure method of certificates.
But strong passwords aren't enough to keep you completely secure.
Security features on Windows Phone 8 include secure boot, which ensures the phone only runs authentic software and passwords with the ability to pre-define the number of failed password attempts.
Passwords designed to hide sensitive information such as credit-card numbers were only slightly more secure than those protecting less important things, like access to games.
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