Strong Passwords are Vital

[Virmir]

Hey folks,

I'm sure you've all heard the spiel before-- "Don't use lame passwords!"  But this is an extra notification just in case, because we've noticed an alarming trend in the error logs here. 

We're apparently under attack by an army of bots pulling usernames from the forums and then trying to "guess" their passwords.  Due to the wide variety of IPs these are coming from, it's very likely this is a global attack on Simple Machines Forums users everywhere.

This is of course, not a huge deal at all as long as your password is not lame.  Don't use a password like "password", your username, or an easy dictionary word in all lowercase, etc.  A number or two and some cReativE capitalizaTION can go a long way in making your password secure.

Thanks folks, and let us know if you see anything funny in the forums.

[Zavier]

An army of bots? Man, there is nowhere on the Internet where you are safe...

[JGGC]

There was some attacks on dA, or something like that, last year. At the time, one of the news articles linked this site:

http://howsecureismypassword.net/

Pretty interesting, actually. Though I've only used it to have fun with ridiculous passwords =P

[Tvorsk]

And I sure wouldn't recommend putting in your real password into some random website.

[EmperorDJ]

I think one of the best passwords I've come up with was for a game I don't play anymore.

It was "Thisisaphonenumber" XD

[Nixuelle]

One trick for coming up with several unique and easy-to-remember passwords is to create a silly sentence related to a given website you are creating the password for, and then simply use the punctuation, capitalization and first letters from the sentence as the password.  For instance, say I wanted to make a new password for my CF account, I could come up with a sentence like:

The honorable lord fluffy, Virmir, rules the Crimson Flag Forum with 2 fuzzy paws!

The corresponding password would be the first letters of each word and the punctuation/captilization, or: Thlf,V,rtCFFw2fp!

Very strong password, and easy to remember if you know the corresponding sentence...! Just my simple advice for this sort of thing.