With recent Sony data breaches in the forefront of people’s minds, PCWorld‘s Alex Wawro couldn’t have picked a better time to write about the best ways to keep your data safe and secure. For one thing, he says it’s important to have different passwords for all of your online accounts. While that might sound impossible, he offers an ingenious trick to fend off most hacker tools.

First, think of a two-word phrase at least eight characters long that you can remember. He uses “ChickenAdobo,” which he peppers with random characters, like this: Ch!cken@dob0. For each site that you need a unique password, take the first and fourth letter of the site and stick it in the middle of your skeleton key. So, for Facebook, your password would be Ch!ckenFe@dob0. Pretty smart, eh?

He also recommends using password management programs such as KeePass ^[1]and LastPass ^[2], although note that the latter noticed a possible security issue with one of their databases and is now requiring some users to change their master password.

To read more password tips, go to PCWorld ^[3]. For more about the anomaly on LastPass’ database, visit lifehacker ^[4].