The Importance of Passwords

This morning I was reading this article on Yahoo Games about the most popular passwords.  It was funny that this article was online today since we are currently having trouble with passwords here at home.  I had never thought to tell my son, to educate him, on the importance of passwords.  I just assumed he would know not to share it and my parents never educated me.  Then I thought about it and the truth was when I was his age there was no passwords!  Scary but it's the truth.  According to the article the top 25 easily hacked passwords are:

1. password (Unchanged)
2, 123456 (Unchanged)
3. 12345678 (Unchanged)
4. abc123 (Up 1)
5. qwerty (Down 1)
6. monkey (Unchanged)
7. letmein (Up 1)
8. dragon (Up 2)
9. 111111 (Up 3)
10. baseball (Up 1)
11. iloveyou (Up 2)
12. trustno1 (Down 3)
13. 1234567 (Down 6)
14. sunshine (Up 1)
15. master (Down 1)
16. 123123 (Up 4)
17. welcome (New)
18. shadow (Up 1)
19. ashley (Down 3)
20. football (Up 5)
21. jesus (New)
22. michael (Up 2)
23. ninja (New)
24. mustang (New)
25. password1 (New)

So I asked my cousin's husband who happens to be a genius with passwords and asked him what his suggestions are for an unbreakable password.  According to him an unbreakable password should contain:

1.  At least one capital letter
2.  At least one symbol
3.  At least two numbers
4.  Contain wording that only you would understand
5.  Change at least every 3 months
6.  Do not have the same password for every account

When I spoke to my son I told him the importance of a password.  I told him all the usual stuff and how it is important not to share his passwords.  And then we started to think about what his new password would be.  He came up with quite the password and I think his password is way more secure than even mine is...now if he can only remember it!