Actually, Feb-1 is the official date but if you have not changed your password since Feb-1, time to do it.  You know it sucks but until everything is Two-Factor, we have to deal with this silly password hygiene.

I love how Intel is promoting this.  Keeping it top of mind is a good thing because again, no one wants to do it until it is too late.

Here is the deal, you are now asked to manage more than 40+ accounts online with everyone wanting you to have a login/password and everyone of them presenting the bad guys an account to compromise.

Do yourself a favor and tool up.

If you have not employed a password management tool, find one you like and start using it.  If you don’t like it, try a different one but trust me, you want to be using a tool to manage all these accounts.

Also, I found this tool recently and I like it a lot.  Wolfram make an app I keep on my iPhone that helps me generate ridiculously strong passwords that are simple to remember.

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/11/21/introducing-the-wolfram-password-generator-reference-app/

But in the end, you really want to make sure you are pushing your services like your bank, credit unions, all the important online accounts to two-factor authentication.  If you think it is a pain in the ass, it is less pain than the comprise of your accounts and the clean up that follows.