Is It Safe To Use Same Password?

In a word:  No.

Using the same passwords and PINs for all of your different cards and websites and email and whathaveyou is very tempting. But it is a bad thing to do.

I'll venture that (almost) everybody has reused a password or personal identification number ("PIN").  Am I right?

But look; if that one word gets out to anybody, then all is at risk. 

But a bunch of fans at Bill O'Rielly's website found out the hard way in 2008 that it's just a bad idea to do that.

It happened that Bill O'Rielly, following his usual MO, took the time to publicly berate a few websites that had cracked wise about the release of Sarah Palin's public emails1.  You remember that event during the campaign; right? 

Well, the sites that he mentioned didn't have anything to do with the actual hacking of Palin's email account but the real hackers either didn't like not getting credit, so to speak, for it or they didn't like it that O'Rielly picked on the wrong guys. 

Maybe it was to help O'Rielly understand how those internet tubes work but, for whatever reason, the hackers struck at the BillOrielly.com website. 

This is where it is important to you -- the password reuser.  The hackers, using some pretty fundamental techniques, were able to waltz in and take a bunch of O'Rielly's premium users' account information and publish it out on the web.

Including their passwords!  

How many of those folks had reused their passwords and so, now, their email accounts at the least and their bankcard ATM accounts too are open to folks who want to order stuff online (let's say).

OK; you get the idea. The O'Reilly example is not to point fingers there but just to help make it clear how easy it is for passwords to slip out. If it's just one website account that is affected then yay. But if it's every account that you own; that's a nightmare.   

1 O'Reilly apparently continues to refer to the Palin emails as "private emails" even though that's a technical oxymoron. Besides, everybody should know by now that what you do on the boss's computers belongs to the boss. Period.