This post is by Thomas Frank, a junior at Iowa State University who runs a college blog of his own called College Info Geek. As long as you're not a vacuum salesman, you can connect with him at his website or on Twitter.

As a college student, you're getting to the point in your life when you have a lot to keep track of online. School email accounts, online banking, FAFSA information, social networks... the list goes on. As you get older, your online life just keeps expanding.

Now that you're in college and have this expanding online life to keep track of, your online security becomes ever more important. In high school, most of the people in your network were your age, and you probably didn't have a lot of resources. Therefore, you probably weren't much of a target for malicious attacks. However, now that you're in college and most likely over 18, a lot of sensitive data becomes yours instead of your parents'. You can get things like credit cards, and loans are now in your name. You're also probably a lot more visible on the internet.

I'm going to expose myself to a potential foot-in-mouth situation here and make what's called a "blanket statement": 

 Your online security sucks.

In fact, if we were to somehow personify your online security, it would probably look something like this... Steve RogersOn the other hand, I can tell you that, at the present moment, my online security looks a little more like this. Coincidentally, my dad looks kinda like this too...I say it looks like this at the present moment because, as recently as two weeks ago, I too had terrible online security. What I'm talking about specifically in this article are passwords. Most of us, including me, are or were at some point guilty of using the same password on every site we have an account with. Some of you might even use a really bad password like your name spelled backwards or something with nothing but lowercase letters. In the past, I used to think it was OK to use the same password everywhere as long as it was really secure. Using that line of thinking, I created one really long, complex password, set it on all my accounts, and settled into a false sense of security. It wasn't until I started learning about web security that I knew how stupid of an idea that was. Now that I know, I've fixed my security problems. In this post, I'll show you how to do the same thing easily and painlessly. However, before I do that, I want to give you a short primer on why using the same password is a bad idea, even if it's a really good one. Essentially, there are two potential pitfalls involved with non-diversification in the security world:

• Screw-ups by you, yourself, and thou
• Screw-ups by the owners of the websites you use

Read on to hear Thomas' advice for protecting yourself online.