Q. Are there any guidelines for choosing a password?
A. It is important to the security of the entire department that your password be secure. Even if you rarely use your account here it is important to the rest of the department that your account be secure from intruders. Random testing will be done and accounts with insecure passwords will be disabled.

Passwords should be between 6 and 8 characters in length, and should mix upper case, lower case, numbers and punctuation symbols. Passwords are case sensitive.

Passwords should never be formed from names, places, or any word that appears in a dictionary or atlas in any language. It is not sufficient to add numbers nor to replace letters with numbers within words. These types of passwords are easily cracked. The password must be composed of a string of characters which are entirely random to anyone except yourself.

A good way to form such a password is to begin with a phrase which is meaningful to you, and thus easy to remember, take the first letter of each word, and then mix in some numbers and punctuation. For example, "j0hn" is next to useless as a password. But if you start with "my brother's name is john" and remember that $20 he owes you, you can form something like "mBniJ$20" which should be easy for you to remember and still random enough to be secure.

Other Rules of Password Security

1. Don't write it down on your desktop, commit it to memory.
2. Change it every few months.
3. Do not give it out to any other person, ever.
4. Never use an unencrypted service such as telnet to log in anywhere.
5. Use a different password for each account you have.

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