Passwords are leaking faster than ever, here's why

This password is strong, the sticky note
on the monitor? Not so much.

If you haven't figured it out yet, here at SumRando, we're big fans of security. In our case, that means protecting your data with a solid VPN over a secure internet connection and using great passwords for everything you do.

But no matter how long or complicated your password is, it seems that someone can crack it these days -- a fact that's putting your personal information in jeopardy.

Ars Technica has a great piece up today on why passwords are now so easy to hack. But if you don't have time to read the whole thing, here are a few major takeaways:

The average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them,  Now used increasingly for computing, graphics processors allow password-cracking programs to work thousands of times faster than they did just a decade ago. A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second. A series of leaks over the past few years containing more than 100 million real-world passwords have provided crackers with important new insights about how people in different walks of life choose passwords on different sites or in different settings. 

The first point is by far my favorite. It might seem obvious, but the statistics show that a horrifying number of people use the same passwords for their Twitter account and their checking account...