Take The Poll: When Do You Change Your Email Password?
Unlike big Corporations that you may work for, having a strict policy for changing your own GMail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Windows Live Hotmail or any other email password probably does not exist.
If you are like many users who use Internet based email, most likely you have not changed your password recently, or for that matter, still have the same password since the day you first created the email account.
If you never experienced having your email account hacked, consider yourself lucky. Believe me, you don't want to experience it. Worse, having a false sense of security in thinking that no one will ever find out your email account password is just ridiculous thinking.
The only way to minimize the chances of preventing someone from hacking into your email account (by discovering your password) is to discipline yourself into changing your password every 30, 60 or 90 days along with creating strong passwords that are harder to break.
So, are you an Internet warrior and change your password(s) or do you wing it and never worry about it?
Take the poll and let us know.
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Comments on Take The Poll: When Do You Change Your Email Password?
Changing your password often does not lessen the chances of being hacked. If a hacker attacks your account, the attack will take place over minutes or hours, not days or weeks. It will not matter if your password is 2 days old or 2 years old. Changing your password at a fixed interval presumes that the attack will take longer than that interval, a presumption that seems very unlikely. If the hacker is not successful quickly, he will move on and search for easier targets with weaker passwords.
Your best defense is strong password, and a secure mail server that limits the number of password attempts per minute (so as to make dictionary attacks infeasible).
@Mike
Another reason for changing your password on a regular basis that you are over looking is the case where your account has been hacked into….but you don't know about it.
If you never changed it the hacker has access for as long as they want. But, if you change it on a regular basis, the hacker won't know it until they can't access your account anymore.
…not all hackers break into accounts to cause immediate damage. Here's one example.