At 09:00 UTC on 24 of May I received an email telling me that the owner of the server of bitcointalk.org had lost control of among other things the password hashes. Since the passwords were not stored themselves the hacker couldn't get the passwords but could confirm a given word to be a password by comparing its hash to the hashes that were stolen.
This is why it is so important to have a strong password. Short passwords can be guessed by trying all possible combinations of characters, others can be guessed when they are found in a dictionary. Any natural language word such as "oxygen", will be in real dictionaries. So, these will also be in the hacker dictionaries which will include things like Oxygen, 0xyg3n and alike. Passwords should be collections of characters not ever used before by anyone ever!
How can this be generated? One is to use a computer or you can get a 20 sided die (icosahedron), and paint 16 sides values 0-9 and then A-F. and the remaining four leave blank. Then you can generate a hexadecimal string as long as you want. Using hexadecimal your passwords should be thirty characters long. You can also go to this site which generates random passwords https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm. You cannot share the passwords with multiple sites but you can save the passwords into a file.
I was unable to even load bitcointalk.org presumably because too many people are trying to change their passwords at the same time. i am still unable to open bitcointalk.org until finally giving up at about 04:00 UTC on May 25th.
heart burn.
