The calendar has ticked over to a new year, so for those who care about such things, resolutions and plans get made. I’ve got a suggestion for you. Make this the year that you fix the password situation you’re living with.

Now, I know, a lot of you are going to say that you don’t have a password situation. For some of you, that may be true. However, there are an awful lot of you that use the same password to log in to Facebook as you use to log in to Amazon.

I’ve seen both my wife and son get hacked because they were using duplicate passwords all over the place.

Wait, you thought I was talking about work?

Well, yeah, there too. Why on earth does your SQL Server instance have the same password as the ‘sa’ login for the network (assuming these are two different log ins, sometimes they’re not <shudder>)? You have two logins at work, right? One for production and one for local use? Further, they have two different passwords right?

This whole password thing is out of hand for a lot of people. So, if you are one of those, make the time (note, I didn’t say “take” the time) to clean things up. For your personal systems, get a password manager like 1Password or LastPass. Through the use of their password generation tools, which work wonderfully, you can set up a distinct password for every account you log in to. For your business, possibly the same thing. I know that some organizations have implemented those tools or maybe KeePass.

Let’s make 2020 the year that we fix this password problem.