Overview
Choosing a good password for University and Engineering computer accounts is very important. It is one of the things that ensures email and computer accounts are not compromised.
The use of a bad password may allow some unscrupulous person to use accounts to modify, corrupt or destroy files. He or she could also send email messages using the compromised account, which could cause untold problems for you.
A good password must not be something that can easily be guessed by a person or a program (a pet’s name, for example). On the other hand, it must be something memorable so that you are not forced to write it down. Hackers tend to guess passwords or use programs that guess passwords using frequently used themes. If you avoid these themes, your account will be much more secure.
What You Should NOT Do
- Don’t use your login name in any form (as-is, reversed, capitalized, doubled, etc)
- Don’t use any form of your eName, first or last name
- Don’t use any information that is easily obtained, such as license plate numbers, telephone numbers, pet’s name, car model, etc.
- Don’t use a word contained in any dictionary of any language, spelling lists, or other lists of words (acronyms, sequences of letters like ‘abcdef’ or ‘qwerty’, place names, car names, etc.)
- Don’t use a strings of repeated characters.
- Don’t use a password shorter than fifteen characters, or with only alphabetic characters or only digits.
- Avoid using the special characters from this list:
- @ $ & \” ( ) ‘ ; = # * blank_space < > ,
What You Should Do
When creating or changing a password, please follow these instructions as well as those suggested above.
- Passwords must have from fifteen to thirty characters. The longer the better.
- The password must have at least one letter within the password.
If you are having difficulty in logging into your account, it may be because of these common account problems.
Wrong Password
If your password is wrong, one of these is most likely the problem:
- You don’t have an Engineering account. You will need to create an Engineering account.
- You forgot your password, you can reset it. Or contact ETS to have your password reset.
