With the recent hacking attacks on the Gawker Media sites - including Gawker. com itself, along with Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and Deadspin - exposing the passwords and e-mail addresses of the users, it has become quite evident that using the same username and password for multiple sites underscores a potential security risk.

Noting that in spite of the fact that the security firms repeatedly keep warning users against the use of same passwords for different sites, users often tend to reuse passwords chiefly because they can be hard to remember and manage.

In the opinion of Jeff Burstein, a senior product manager with the Symantec security firm, the Gawker hacks show, yet again, that there is a "fundamental problem" with passwords - that is, they "get reused and shared across multiple sites."

Going by an analysis by Duo Security, the most of the passwords involved in the Gawker attacks were the notably simplistic ones - commonly being passwords like "123456" and the word "password" itself.

According to a `strong password' recommendation by IT-Harvest's chief research analyst Richard Stiennon, the "best practice" is never to use a word that can be found in the dictionary. Explaining to eWEEK, Stiennon said: "Use the first letter of each word in a phrase. `When IT Rains it Pours' becomes WIRIP. Add a number to make it eight characters long - WIRIP421. Change the `I' to `!' and you have a pretty strong password you can remember: W! R! P421."