Phishing, which is the illegal obtainment of passwords and user names, caused 20 people at the university to have more than 120,000 spam messages sent from their accounts in January. To prevent easy password hacking, students are required to change their passwords every 120 days.

According to an article on MSNBC.com, 54 percent of people between ages 18 to 29 have given out their password in the last year. Giving out your password is about as brilliant as handing out your PIN to a random stranger, so I’m not sure why someone would think that’s a good idea. Because of those people, I’m advised to have a password with one letter, one number and one special character.

Are you kidding me? I can barely remember my own name half the time thanks to a busy college life. Creating crazy passwords that look like swear words in a cartoon makes them impossible to hack, but it also makes them impossible for me to remember.

Life would be a lot easier if people would just stop trying to steal my identity. Until then, I’m left with the precarious problem of hiding the sheet of paper on which I’ve written all my passwords.

Editor-in-chief Libby Davis for the editorial board.