n early August, Wired reporter Mat Honan had his most precious passwords hacked via a complex series of social engineering exploits. The breach made headlines because it exposed security flaws in Apple and Amazon customer service policies; but let’s not forget that the Honan saga capped a long summer full of server invasions that exposed millions of user passwords en masse.

In June, hackers stole some 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords and posted them online. That same month, intruders compromised about 1.5 million eHarmony passwords in a security breach, and in July hackers grabbed 450,000 Yahoo Voice passwords. Among the most common passwords used by those Yahoo members: “123456,” “welcome,” and the ever-popular “password.”

The fundamental problem isn’t that these sites should have done a better job protecting user data (though they should have). And it isn’t that users chose passwords that were exceedingly easy to crack and then recycled the same flimsy passwords at every site where they registered (though they did).How to find happiness in a world of password madness