We’ve been over this before, people.

“Jason123” is not a password. “Password” is not a password. “MyRover” is not a password. “ABC123” is not a password. They are engraved invitations to please steal my bank account information. Enterprise password management professionals, please let your people know this.

DailyFinance does a good job giving a list of what a “password” is, defined as something that might actually deter someone from stealing your online information, is. Maybe you underestimate the power of a decently-constructed password. You would be wrong.

“Use a combination of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and characters,” DailyFinance advises. It's not as complicated as it seems. Think of a personalized license plate script with the added benefit of characters, they say – no, please don’t use your personalized license plate as your password.

“Use a different password for every account.” Not as tough to remember as it sounds: “Add a category to your main password. For example, for a bank account, your password could be Iam:)2b29bank. An AOL (News - Alert) account could be Iam:)2b29aol.”

“Get rid of passwords with favorite colors, pet's names, 1-1-1-1-1 and the like.” Yes, it’s true that hackers might not know your guinea pig’s name, but they do have the capability for dictionary attacks that cover words and number sequences. “MyRover” is not a password. ILV4MyroVer! is a fine password.

“Know you are being watched.” In other words, please don’t use ILV4MyroVer! as your password. We certainly won’t be using it.

“Be vigilant against phishing,” explained well by Daily Finance as, “those emails that appear to be from a source you trust, but are set up to commit identity or credit card theft.” You’d be amazed how believable they are these days, it’s not just Nigerian royalty promising to put $12.6 million in your bank account.

“Change your passwords every six months or so.” Yes we’d like you to do it more often, but if you do it only twice a year, well, you’re ahead of most others.

“The root of a secure password begins with a secure PC.” If you don’t have a decent anti-virus program, a commercial product that runs automatically, then we need to have that conversation first, since nothing you do with passwords will really matter unless you’ve got that covered.