Zappos Hacking

You've probably heard the news that shopping site Zappos.com, which sells housewares along with shoes, had its database hacked and that shoppers' personal information was likely accessed. While Zappos claims that the really important personal information is still safe—hackers may know your shoe size, though—and that only the last four digits of your credit card may have been accessed, there are bigger implications for your personal and financial security because of the Zappos hacking.

"The bigger problem Zappos faces is that large databases of consumer information can be used for identity theft," warns Stephen B. Wicker, Ph.D., Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. "As Zappos acknowledged, users who use the same or similar passwords are at risk of theft through access to other sites such as Amazon or Ebay."

What does this mean if you're an avid online shopper like I am? That you need to be even smarter about how you set up passwords when you're shopping online.

I used to use the same password whenever I logged into a website—whether it be for banking or shopping for bedding—but quickly changed my ways when stories like this Zappos hacking started showing up in the news a few years ago. I altered all of my passwords so that they were unique to every site I used. However, if you accessed my information and were smart about patterns, you would see that I had a formula I was using at every website to make a password. Though the passwords were different, there was definitely a common thread throughout them. This was true—up until yesterday.

For the first time since the holidays, when I did a bulk of my holiday shopping at Zappos, I logged onto the Zappos site to change my password. Just as you'd heard in the news, Zappos had automatically cancelled out my old password and was asking me to create a new one. I tried a couple of variations—passwords I could remember but which would be tricky to hack—and Zappos kept telling me that my password was too weak. Finally, I came up with a combination that Zappos liked and accepted.

Thankfully, my web browser remembers passwords because, without my formula at the ready, I'm not sure how I'm going to remember all the new passwords I'm spending today putting in place. I'm doing this in case, as Dr. Wicker suggests, the hackers somehow use my personal information from Zappos to attack my other online accounts. This way, hopefully, they will have a harder time doing so.

If you like to shop online for housewares, home decor, cooking tools, or anything else for the home, I would suggest that you spend some time in the next day or so updating all of your passwords, just in case.

By the way, you really do need to get creative with the passwords you choose. And please don't choose any of the following, which Mashable ranked as the most popular passwords for 2011 and which are the easiest to hack:

1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123