You may have heard in the past couple of months about increased "hacker" activity on the internet. Some of this activity included effective attacks against some of the world"s largest internet presences, like Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo! These attacks were a form of "denial of service" attack, a way of hogging a system"s resources so effectively, no one else can talk to the system.

One of the many ways WCTS is tightening security on our electronic campus is through the strengthening of passwords. WCTS has installed new software to help people pick better passwords, the first line of defense against malicious users. You should change your Marcus password at some point during the next couple of weeks... after that WCTS is going to perform regular security checks, and accounts with easily guessable passwords are going to be locked until the password is changed to something more acceptable.

After running some preliminary tests, WCTS estimates that in under two weeks, a single hacker would easily be able to compromise nearly 700 accounts on Marcus - that"s over a third of the users!

In case you were wondering, there have been at least three accounts broken into in recent weeks. One of these accounts was even running the same software used to attack Amazon.com and eBay.

"So what?" you might ask. With access to your account, a hacker could read or destroy your private email and files, pose as you (forge email from you), or run software that has a detrimental effect on thousands of users (and, running from your account, you"ll probably get the blame for it too!)