Today is Change Your Password Day according to the social media scheduler PostoPlan‘s content calendar.

Not only is Change Your Password Day a fun opportunity to remind people to change their passwords regularly, it’s also a great opportunity to learn where this day originated and why.

In 2012, Matt Buchanan came up with the idea of “Change Your Password Day” to raise security awareness because of the increase of hackers’ attacks on private and public targets.

We should all know the importance of why passwords should be changed regularly, yet because the benefits of updating your passwords is often trumped by the need to remember new passwords this good habit is often overlooked and neglected.

Use a strong password is:

• at least 16 characters long
• capital and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols
• not a word from the dictionary or a common phrase
• unique to every online account

It’s good practice to change passwords for all your accounts monthly, including your email account, but how do you remember all of these passwords?

I don’t. I use a password storage database to remember for me.

This handy and secure piece of software allows you to store all your passwords in one place so you eliminate the need to remember them all.

My personal favourite password storage database is the opensource KeePassX, which has downloadable versions for Windows, MaxOS and Linux.

Sadly, when I went to grab the latest version as I wrote this article, I discovered this gem is no longer actively supported.

Thankfully, someone else picked up the torch and released an updated version based on the same source code – KeePassXC – and it too offers versions for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

So, it appears one more benefit of these content calendar days is that by researching and writing this article, I learn my favourite program got a face lift.