'What is your favorite Internet password?'

"What is your favorite Internet password?" Wait! Don't answer that! It's a trick question — because you should be creating unique passwords for the various sites and service you use. For some reason though, one website seems to think otherwise.

The UPSJobs website doesn't have passwords at all; instead, it forces you to select a single sign-in question. UPSJobs "actually encourages you not to use a unique password, but instead to use a password that other people might be able to guess (such as the name of your most loved pet or movie)," says a report by security firm Sophos.

One such question, which made the Sophos folks chuckle disapprovingly, was the one above.

"You shouldn't have a favorite Internet password," says the Sophos researcher, explaining that proper security means having a distinct password for every online account you use. 

"Oh, but I can be tricky and still have a secure answer! I'll just include a few random characters such as exclamation marks," you might be thinking right now, but a researcher at Sophos has some bad news for you:

It actually gets worse. When I first created a profile on UPSJobs, and tried to use a half-decent password (one that contained extended characters such as exclamation marks, and dollar signs), the site wouldn't accept it as my password.

Again, by refusing to accept a more complex password they were actively encouraging me to choose a simpler, easier-to-hack password.

Yikes! Time to rethink your security scheme, UPS!

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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook. Oh, and she can be found on Google+, too.

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Did your lame password let 'beach body' hack Twitter?

via Sophos

Thousands of Twitter users continue to endure tweets telling them to "get the beach body you've always wanted" possibly because one third of Internet users still insist on using the same password on multiple websites.

"The messages link to what pretends to be a news website, but is really designed to promote an Acai Berry 'miracle diet' marketed as 'Power Slim,' " reports Sophos. "The product claims to have been seen in the pages of Women's Health, Elle, Marie Claire, Oprah, Cosmopolitan and other magazines."

Sound familiar?

Claims about acai berries made in fake news stories that appear in pop-ups, Google search results, on real news sites (including msnbc.com) and even on WebMd.com got the beatdown earlier this year by the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC filed charges against companies and individuals for allegedly blurring the lines between advertisements and journalism by promoting false information about acai and colon cleansing. In some cases, companies and individuals were hit with temporary restraining orders preventing assets from being moved or records from being destroyed. The offending websites must prominently display a statement that they are being sued by the FTC, or be removed from the Web.  

Meanwhile, this latest Twitter spam scam seems familiar as well.

"It could be that the users' passwords have been compromised, similar to another Acai Berry spam campaign we saw on Twitter at the end of last year following the Gawker password breach," writes Graham Cluley, Sophos senior tech consultant.

Hackers used passwords grabbed in the Gawker hack to infiltrate user accounts on Twitter and other sites. As Cluley points out, "Too many users (perhaps as many as a third) are still using the same password for every website they access."

If you find your Twitter account suddenly spamming your followers, change your password right away — on Twitter and anywhere else you're using that same password. In fact, even if you haven't been hacked, why not take this moment to switch up your passwords to the Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts you know you totally have open at work right now?

Here's a video from Sophos to help you think up some good ones:

More on the annoying way we live now:  

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.

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