As many of you whom use Twitter know, Twitter was highly embarrassed earlier this year with an eighteen year old kid–going by GMZ–broke into the account of a Twitter staff member using the password ‘happiness.’ GMZ proceeded to hijack many high profile accounts such as then President-Elect Barack Obama and Fox News’s primary feed. After that, Twitter wouldn’t allow passwords to be “too obvious,” like ‘password’ or ’123456′.

The other day it was discovered that Twitter has banned 370 passwords from being used. The more obvious passwords like ’111111′ and ‘password1′ are on the list but several commonly used passwords are also on the list like ‘iloveyou’ or ‘edward.’ If you’d like to have the list, you can view a text file of all the passwords (by TechCrunch).

Twitter is forcing users to doing something, in my opinion, the masses as a whole should do: secure their accounts using secure passwords. Sure, using your dog Maggie’s name or feeding your ego by being able to type ‘bigdick’ (yes, it’s on the ban list) each time you login is a great thing and definitely easy to remember, but you leave yourself vulnerable to brute force hack attempts–breaking into an account by systemically trying passwords until you get right one.

Find out more about keeping your accounts secure after the jump.

To protect yourself, here’s a few quick steps you can do right now:

• Write down all the websites you have passwords to and give them a secure rating of 1, 2, or 3 with three being the most necessary to secure (like bank accounts).
• Go to a website with a password generator and create 3 passwords 8 characters in length using letters, numbers, and punctuation (!_*,). (I recommend PC Tools for this task since it can spit out the type of password we want, not include easily confusable characters (i, l, 1, I, o, 0), and show your password phonetically. For example, it spit out c@Tr$42Q as a password which has an excellent combination of letters, numbers, and punctuation and is phonetically pronounced “charlie – At – TANGO – romeo – Dollar – Four – Two – QUEBEC”.)
• Assign each of those passwords to each of the secure ratings and then go about changing each of the sites to the new password.

Now, you have three levels of security. So, if someone finds out the password to a level 2 site, they won’t be able to access level 1 or 3 sites!

If you think you’re not going to remember the passwords, don’t think about writing them down. Download a password keeper like KeePass. KeePass is a very secure password vault which comes with a password generator and helps you to keep your passwords fresh by automatically expiring your passwords, if you’d like. It can also type your passwords for you.

There you have it: personal password security 101. If I missed something or there are questions/comments, ask them below! :)