Earlier this week, several administrative accounts at Twitter were hacked, revealing several internal documents along with revealing a good deal about Twitter’s corporate culture – things like which programs they use for creating work documents, plans for a reality show, and the fact that they use weak passwords – one of which was the word “password.”

While you can be sure that the social network’s popularity makes it a target for hackers who know how to execute sophisticated attacks, it seems that Twitter’s biggest vulnerability was a lax attitude towards their own security.

It should be noted that, as far as anyone knows, this doesn’t open any security vulnerabilities to the end user.

We all need to take this as a reminder that we should periodically change our own passwords, especially those for online banking accounts and for anything containing information we really care about – our Facebook accounts, for example, contain much information that helps define our identities to the outside world.

Our online passwords are frequently our best – and sometimes our only – defense against identity theft. It is crucially important that these passwords are secure. (Yes, that means using a password other than “password.”

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered did an interesting story in May called “The Search for the Perfect Password.” It contains a lot of useful advice for creating good passwords and some amusing anecdotes about bad passwords.

Some things to avoid when creating new passwords:

• Simple dictionary words, spelled as such
• Family information (birthdays, anniversaries, children’s names)
• Using the same password across services
• Using only letters or only numbers
• Leaving the password written on a Post-It note on the desk next to the computer.

Now, we understand that keeping track of a lot of passwords, especially when you’re throwing new ones into the mix all the time, can be daunting – especially if you’re avoiding the Post-It note method, but there are several useful tools to track your passwords. Firefox has a built-in password manager, while there is a piece of software for Mac computers called 1Password that does the same thing. The NPR story above earlier contains many helpful links to solutions such as those.