www.idtheftcenter.org ) reported increase of 47% more breaches in the past year than the breaches reported in 2007

Javelin ( www.javelinstrategy.com ) reports that the number of identity fraud victims has increased to 9.9 million adults in the United States and costs totaled $48 billion in 2008.

People rely more and more on the Internet to access their online personalized web based accounts to do online banking, shopping, sharing content, socializing and managing e-mail accounts. Alphanumeric passwords currently handle most authentication and identification tasks.

Text passwords are an imperfect solution from several aspects. People often use obvious passwords in order not to forget them. Thus, people might commonly choose the names of their children or their pet's name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 or the last 4 digits of their social security number. 123 or 1234 or 123456. Others might "password" their favorite football team name, date of birth their wife or their child's or use the words "god" "letmein" "money" "love". The obvious passwords considered as a weak password that is either easy to guess or are easily hacked with password generator programs.

On the other hand, strong passwords are passwords with a long set of characters hard to guess. They contain numbers as well as letters in many cases. However, people cannot reasonably remember random characters.

The more people use the internet, the more they open additional personal web based accounts. Consequently, their lives on the Web become more transparent and vulnerable to identity theft and data hacking. That would lead to the inevitable conclusion that text passwords are not a strong enough watch dog for web based accounts where private data is stored.