Have you ever wondered about those annoying required password changes? Does frequently changing your password actually improve your account security or is it useless? A study by Cormac Herley, a researcher at Microsoft, has cast doubt on what many of us have come to consider commonsense when it comes to password security, raising the question of whether practices like regularly changing your password are actually worth the effort.

Want to secure your passwords? Take a look at our recommendations for password security.

Breaking Down Your Password Security

If you’re using a simple password like “1234” or “abc123” then we recommend changing it because both of those are, without a doubt, very weak passwords. They’re also very common passwords, which is why they’re often contained in lists of common passwords used by security professionals to audit password security and by hackers that use them for more nefarious reasons, such as gaining illicit access to your accounts and devices.

The tough part about having a secure password is remembering it. After all, it’s much easier to remember a password like “qwerty” than it is to remember a password like “dsjL2@#f9iFWex.Q” — right? Right. Fortunately, there’s password management software that allows you to ‘securely’ store all of your passwords. We say ‘securely’ because there’s always a chance that your password management software will get hacked, which most certainly has happened before. Still, a secure password goes a long way and using a password management solution can provide you with an effective solution for managing all your complicated and thus secure passwords.