The Security Mentor

There's a recent report in the Washington Post that AOL ignores anything past the first 8 characters of your password and ignores all the non-alphabetic characters that everyone tells you to include in your password.

The truth seems to be more subtle (details for your technical friends) but the lesson is the same. Put the randomness at the beginning of your password and don't count on the difference between uppercase and lowercase letters. "pAsSWoRd123"is almost as bad as "password" as a password.

Don't get too worried.