The lack of seriousness with which many people their passwords is taken sometimes causes decisions such as that taken Spotify. Apparently, the Swedish company has sent an email to some of its users, asking them to reset their passwords as “preventive security measure”.

The decision comes following the recent leaks of passwords Dropbox and Last.fm, as a pure measure of caution, because many people have the dangerous habit of using the same password for everything . Or at least that’s what it says in the statement that Dropbox has sent some of its members.

In the email, you can see posted in some tweets, Spotify says “to protect your account, we have reset your password. This is because we believe may have been compromised in a data breach another service for which use the same password”.

This suggests that Spotify has leaked analyzed these accounts (without aiming exactly what service they belong), has compared them with passwords of its users, and has reset the of those who used the same password for both.

The email ends usuaurios reassuring: “Do not worry it is a security measure! Purely preventive No one has entered your Spotify account and your data is safe.”. Is I is, therefore, identical to a few days ago with case Dropbox, where the company forced users with earlier accounts to 2012 (and which have not changed your password since) to do so at that time because the leak of a set of service credentials obtained in 2012.

Still, and especially seeing what happened with Dropbox only five days after that request password change, it is not surprising that this email Spotify has caused some alarm among its users.

How to secure passwords once and for all

Spotify preventive measure, in any case, again drawn back to light, as we said at the beginning, the lack of seriousness with which people take their online security, especially the issue of passwords .

It is a problem that, in fact, reminds us each year Splashdata its annual reports on what the worst passwords. Although hard to believe, we took five years “123456” and “password” as the two most commonly used passwords. The lack of much of Internet users how the network operates, the false sense of security “to me is not going to play ,” and prioritizing comfort over security ( it is much easier to remember ” 123456 “that” dkfER563 [wGutfi8 & d} 374 “) are some of the reasons for many to follow them using.

And not only that, but as apparently has been found Spotify, some users still have the habit of using the same password for multiple services, with the danger that entails.

Another option is to use a password manager, also taking certain precautions to prevent our data is filtered in case there is a security hole, as they discovered this summer in LastPass.

Finally, a good idea, and can better help remember several different passwords, you are using phrases that are more complex and have more characters, so they are harder to find in a brute force attack.