Computer and Network Services
Choosing A Good Password
Passwords are your way of confirming your identity to the computer systems. In order to be safe and useful, passwords must be secure. Choose a password that is as difficult as possible for a would-be intruder to guess. Some guidelines for choosing a password are:
Do not use your userid (login name) or any part of your real name, in any form.
Do not use information easily obtained about you. This includes license plate numbers, telephone numbers or brand of automobile.
Do not use a word contained in a dictionary. This includes English and foreign language dictionaries, as well as dictionaries of science fiction characters and places, TV characters, names of humans and animals, etc.
Do not simply append or prepend numbers or punctuation marks to words — a password like oriole2 or !baseball is as easy to break as a dictionary word.
Use a password at least eight characters in length.
Use a password with mixed-case alphabetic characters.
Use a password with non alphabetic characters, e.g., numbers or punctuation.
Use a password that is easy to remember.
Use a password that you can type quickly without looking at the keyboard.
Some suggestions: Make up a sentence and use the first letter of each word in the sentence to create a password. For instance, the password IwboJ12 could be derived from the sentence, "I was born on July 12." Another example is TbO!Tb , from Shakespeare's "To be or not to be." A secure password is composed of characters with no apparent meaning.