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. Read on. »