Why Should I Select Strong PassPhrases?
If someone stole your PassPhrase, that person could pretend to be you while committing unauthorized or illegal actions on-line. Here are just a few examples of this:
- Someone could use your e-mail account to send threatening or pornographic e-mail to others.
- Someone could gain access to your computer and install a sniffer program to capture PassPhrases from other computers on the network and gain access to those computers. Once access is gained, confidential data can be stolen or deleted.
- Your compromised computer can be used to infect thousands of other computers on the network and cause the network performance to become so slow that it is rendered useless. You would not be able to use the ECU network to access e-mail, coursework or web sites.
As you can see from the examples above, it is very important to select strong PassPhrases. Not only is your personal data at risk but all the resources and data that attach to the campus network are also at risk. Since we all share the campus network, we must all share the responsibility of protecting it.
You may ask, "What can I do?" There are many aspects to protecting your computer from attackers. We are only addressing in this document how selecting strong PassPhrases can help in securing the ECU network.
Below are recommendations that will assist you in selecting and protecting strong PassPhrases:
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Don't select an obvious password A computer program can guess your password within minutes by trying every word in the dictionary. These programs check for passwords that are names, words with numbers, common misspellings and other commonly used passwords. You also don't want to pick a password with personal significance...your pet's name, your telephone number, your User ID, Pirates, for examples.
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Don't select passwords that are short (less than 8 characters). Selecting a password with less than 8 characters reduces the time it takes for a computer program to guess your password from minutes to seconds. Anything less than an eight character PassPhrase makes it too easy to guess your PassPhrase. It simply won't hold up for long on the network.
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Don't select passwords that are made up of a few types of characters. A combination of several types of characters will significantly decrease a likely-hood of a computer program guessing your password. On systems that support them, passwords should contain at least three of the four character classes below:
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Numeral (0-9)
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Uppercase letter (A-Z)
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Lowercase letter (a-z)
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Special character (!, @, #, *, :) etc.
How To Remember Strong Passwords?
Using phrases or sentences can make it relatively easy to remember your PassPhrase. That's why we recommend the use of PassPhrases versus passwords. A PassPhrase can be a sentence where you select the first letter of each word as your password. It will make no sense to anyone but you. A PassPhrase can also be an entire sentence with numbers and symbols added.
- Select a sentence that has meaning to you. Use the first letter of each word of that sentence and add capitalization, symbols and special characters to it.
- Is Econ 220 being offered this semester? (IE2bots?)
- Only three more weeks until vacation time! (O3mwuVt!)
- Select a sentence and add symbols, capitalization and numbers to it and use the entire phrase as your password. Do not select phrases that are common to everyone. (Go@Pirates!) for example.
