Today, I was the victim of a hacker/spammer.  When I pulled up one of my web pages, I found a nasty little note from my web host stating that my account had been suspended for violating the Terms of Service Agreement.  Of course, I had no clue what I could have done, since I don’t even do mass mailings, and none of my sites have any kind of material that would be considered objectionable.  So, I had to call customer support to try and track down the problem.

It turns out that someone got a hold of one of my email passwords, probably because it was the same or similar to other passwords that I have used.  This hacker signed into my online email account, and sent out at least one spam message.  When my host saw it, they suspended all of my accounts, and shut down all of my sites.  I couldn’t even log into my control panel to see what was going on.  My email accounts were all frozen.  Basically, I couldn’t do anything until talking to customer support.

In the end, I had to change all the passwords of my email accounts before they would open the accounts back up for me.  That made me do some much needed maintenance on all the accounts, deleting several that were no longer in use, and only getting filled up with spam anyway.  So, now I have quite a few less accounts, and they all have nifty new passwords.

So, the moral of the story is that password selection, and protection is vitally important.  I know that is not new information, but it is something that I got reminded of in an unpleasant way today.  So, here are a few tips for passwords:

• Don’t use the same passwords for multiple accounts
• Don’t use easy to guess elements in your passwords (address, phone number, SS number, kid’s names, pet’s names, etc…)
• Use a mixture of letters and numbers
• Use capital letters interspersed randomly throughout the password
• Use long passwords–the longer they are, the harder they are to guess
• Put nonsensical  phrases together to form a password that you can remember, but which cannot be guessed
• Using strings of letters and numbers in no particular order, with random capital letters can make the most secure passwords

I’m sure there are some other good tips for passwords, but maybe this will get you started, and make sure that your accounts stay a bit more secure than mine were today!