Thanks to RockYou and some hacker yet to take credit for his generosity, anybody who was interested was able to download and study a list of 32 million passwords. I, for one, wasn’t too surprised with the findings.

Imperva, a security company, found that almost one percent of the users in this list used “123456” for a password. I’ve never watched anything related to a Darwin Award but I’ve heard about it. If anything, I was surprised that this percent wasn’t larger. Maybe “654321” didn’t count.

We all can’t be gifted or academic achievers or whatever the current euphemism is now. For that matter, how many dumb passwords do you have? Come one, be honest, they can’t all be that spectacular. I have to keep my desk organized the same way every day or I lose my visual cues for most of the ones I keep.

Imperva also reported that twenty percent of the people used the same pool of about 5,000 words. This number actually impresses me. I knew that at least for English, we limit ourselves to a terribly small pool of words with which to use on a daily basis.

The DuBois Learning Center posted a table from The Reading Teachers Book of Lists by Fry, Kress and Fountoukidis on their website. According to this webpage, three hundred of the most common words “make up sixty-five percent of all written material in English.” Imagine how boring the research for that must have been. I bet Twitter posts have even more stellar results.

Therefore, I say a pool of 5,000 words looks creative to me.

The underlying problem is that we have password overload. We simply have too many and too much to memorize. Every site and their mother demands a password from you. Don’t forget about work. You’ve got easily half a dozen right there.

Find me one office that doesn’t have a yellow sticky note with the password written on it. How secure is that? If I don’t label my passwords, then I forget which ones are for which. As least we know we’re not going to have some Russian in our office pulling our sticky notes off and absconding with them. Unless you live a life like in 24 or one of those Bourne movies.

Hey, I know of at least one person who lost his job because he left his notebook full of passwords and security codes on the bathroom counter when he went to the toilet. Man, did that stuff ever hit the fan when somebody else found his notebook before he did.

But who can memorize all those passwords?

The best thing to do? Follow the advice to segment your passwords into different levels. We’ve got the secret password for the secret stuff that’s not that secret. Who really cares about most of the accounts we have to make to get into stuff online? Make a new email account and toss it out when things get too hot.

But for that stuff that we’d really be worried about, take a top-secret approach for those passwords. Use a strong password that you change frequently. And shred all sticky notes when you get tweeted about the auditors coming down your hall.