EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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You should change you CaneID password, if you haven't in the last six months. In the fine print, below, you will find (1) a way of generating easy to remember and hard to guess passwords and (2) some suggestions that might help you remember your passwords.
THE DETAILS
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When was the last time you changed your CaneID password? That is the password that you use to connect to MyUM, among other things. If you haven't done it in the last six months, why not take a moment and do it now? A policy is about to be implemented requiring that this password be changed regularly. If you change it now, you won't have to change it again this summer, when they notify people with "stale" passwords.
HOW DO YOU MAKE A GOOD PASSWORD?
A good password is easy to remember and hard to guess. To make it hard to guess it should be long(ish) and consist of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters. Here is an example of a good password: "Iw2bSOCf67-71." (The first character is a capital i, not a lower-case L.) This password is longish, and would be very hard to guess. It looks like random gibberish. BUT IT IS VERY EASY TO REMEMBER, since it comes from the sentence, "I went to beautiful St. Olaf College from 1967-71." As long as I remember the sentence, I can quickly and easily type in the password. You can do this with any sentence, but it is useful to have numbers in it somewhere. For example, "My two wonderful children are named John and Marion." would become "M2wcanJaM." This password has upper-case letters, lower-case letters, a number, and a punctuation symbol. It looks like gibberish but is easy to generate any time I need to use it.
A SECRET ABOUT PASSWORDS
Since you may type in your password a lot, make it something positive. Note that I included "beautiful" in the first password and "wonderful" in the second password. Every time I type in these passwords, I will reinforce my positive feelings. What I say I think. What I think I act upon. So make your sentence positive and your password can help you be a better person. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
WRITING IT DOWN
Most security instructions admonish you to NEVER write down your password. I ALWAYS write down my password, especially when I first create it. That is when I am most likely to forget it, since I have to unlearn the old one, which causes interference with recalling the new one. But I only write down the sentence, somewhere innocuous, not the actual password. Someone would have to find my sentence and then figure out how to turn it into my password. Since I write down LOTS of sentences and notes, I feel comfortable with this. If you don't feel comfortable writing down your password, another strategy is to log out and back in a number of times immediately after changing a password. That will begin to teach your fingers how to type the new password and help extinguish the old password.
STORE YOUR PASSWORDS ON YOUR COMPUTER
If you are like me, you have LOTS of passwords. If you don't have lots of passwords, you probably use the same password over and over, something you know you should not do. I store my passwords on my computer, encrypted with a strong password, such as those described above. I use a commercial program, but there is a free program called KeePass (http://keypass.info) for Windows that has gotten strong recommendations. You might want to give that a try. It can even enter your passwords for you on login pages on the web, so it makes it easy to use strong passwords, that are unique for each account, and change them often.
I personally use 1Password on my Mac and iPhone to keep track of my passwords and my software keys and such. I used RoboForm on my PC before I switched to a Mac. KeePass was not available back then.
DISCLAIMER
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These suggestions are for your personal use. If you are told to do things differently by someone with authority, do it the way you are told by that person.
Bill Vilberg
