Password Safety/Security (And Tools to Track Logins)

Today there was a bulk email from wordpress, which houses a LOT of blogs and websites and which I have an account at in order to 'keep up with the industry by being part of another website in the business of having lots of people it 'facilitates' in a similar but also different way than Lumigrate. 

They'd had a security breach and I really respect that they let people know ASAP AND provided education that I have been given by MY teachers, so thought I'd add it here for people to refer to on Lumigrate.com.  (When I help people register as new users if they need assistance, I've become aware that many don't know how hackers work. 

If Lumigrate were hacked into (and in order to most likely prevent that we use a top end domain hosting company and have our security certificate from them as well -- they have OUTSTANDING customer service and they're a rapidly growing company called Hostgator, you might have seen them in the news for their growth in the last year), the 'bad people' are trying to find the passwords people use to log into nonfinancial websites because people who are noneducated about the Internet tend to use the same password on multiple sites. 

AND I'm editing this in 2015 to say that there were NOT 'really' people who were interested in reading this topic 'hitting it'.  It was something I was trying to provide at that time because so many of the users of Lumigrate were needing to learn the same things I was needing to learn, we are an Internet site and so it just made sense to me to have resources about how to navigate more safely on the Internet. 

 

Use a strong password, meaning something random with numbers and punctuation.
Use different passwords for different sites.
If you have used the same password on different sites, switch it to something more secure.
(Tools like 1Password, LastPass, and KeePass make it easy to keep track of different unique logins.)

Thanks to WordPress for being a good example of how to handle the unfortunate issues that occur sometimes and for helping us ALL with awareness and education.  I hope by sharing this I hae done my part on this topic today and it will help people.