8th June 2012

Music streaming website Last.fm is the latest in a series of companies to suffer a leak of customer passwords.  A message on the UK company’s website homepage tells customers to change their passwords as a precautionary measure.

This is the latest breach in a series of password leaks from sites such as business social networking site linkedin and dating site eHarmony.

Our advice is to make sure you always have different passwords for different websites.  This can prove an extremely difficult task and the last thing you want to do is write it down.

One good strategy we advise is to take a word, replace certain characters with numbers and somewhere within that word include perhaps the first and third letters of the website.  So for example take the word membership as your basis, passwords are case sensitive so why not change this now to MemberShip, now lets add a couple of numbers, why not replace the first e and the i to 3 and 1 so now its M3mbersh1p, now lets include the first and third letters from the website, so for linked in that would be ln so now lets put it all together, your password would be M3mberlnSh1p.

Once you get the theory of using a strategy for your passwords it’s really easy to follow the same procedure.