Your network account is required to have a password to keep other people out of your account. On the Whitman College network your password is like a suit of armour, it protects you in many vital areas - it protects your email communications. If someone can gain access to your account they can delete your files, read your mail, and even mess things up so much you won't be able to log in again.

It also guards your privacy, even if you think you have nothing valuable saved there. If someone from outside the school gains access to your account, they can use it to maliciously attack the whole system. Your personal password ensures that our shared resources are secure against vandalism and abuses. With this well crafted armor in place you can have a greater degree of confidence in the reliability and security of the Whitman network.

To choose a secure password consider all of the following:

• Your password should be at least five but not more than eight characters long.
• Your password should contain combinations of numbers, UPPER and lower case letter, and/or symbols such as !@#*?. There are 456976 different possibilities for passwords using only four alphabetic characters of the same case, but over 1,000,000,000,000,000 possible eight character passwords using both cases, numbers, and symbols.
• The system stores your real name along with your username, therefore it is very important not to choose any part of your real name as your password. Names of family members, names of pets, or any other personal names also make bad passwords.
• Do not use any word found in the dictionary as your password. Many password cracking programs use the dictionary to try to break in, since this is much faster than trying all combinations of characters. Foreign Language dictionaries are also used for the same purpose, so avoid them as well.
• Appending numbers and symbols to dictionary words also doesn't help much. Programs can easily be set to try word1, word2, etc.
• Computer and sci-fi jargon and acronyms are often used as passwords, so many cracking programs have a jargon dictionary included for words not in the English language. Jargon from other areas (such as legal jargon) is also unsafe.
• People like passwords that are easy to remember and type, but some passwords that meet many of the requirements above are over-used and easily guessed. Do not use sequences like 123456 or qwerty as a password.