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Academic Computing and Networking Services

Colorado State University

Password Tips



Tips for using passwords to keep your information safe:

TIP: Never share your password with anyone - not even your loved ones or co-workers.
While you may trust these people, you shouldn’t trust that they know how to keep passwords secure. Never, never respond to a request from any organization (particularly a financial institution) that requires you to submit your login and password by email, since it's probably a hoax.

TIP: Never leave your password written down where someone could find it.
Anyone wandering by your desk and seeing a password on a sticky note could log on to your computer as you, and commit crimes in your name - including copyright violations, child pornography, threats, and fraud. If these are done with your logon, especially from your computer, it becomes difficult to prove it wasn’t you!

TIP: Make your password hard for someone else to guess.
Short, common passwords are easy to “brute-force”. Lists of the encrypted versions of short passwords are already posted on the Internet, so it’s trivial to compromise your computer if your password is “password”, the name of your pet, or “gorams”. Choose something more random-looking that you can still remember, using numerals, some upper-case letters and special characters, like “Nitw**D!” (Now is the winter of our discontent!). Hardware restrictions currently prevent your eID password from being more than 8 characters, but that should be fixed by December, so next time you change it can be much longer (and harder to guess).

TIP: Don’t use your important passwords for gaming or social networking sites.
If your password is compromised, then any system you access with that password could be compromised. So, if you use your banking password for a YouTube account, it’s like an open invitation to have your bank account emptied. Fixing this means keeping track of more passwords, but there are tools to make it easier. For Windows, Linux and PocketPC, one of the best is the Open Source tool PasswordSafe. For Mac OSX, there's the Keychain Access included in the OS, and the free download 1Passwd for more functions.

TIP: PayPal offers a one-time password generator for use with eBay and PayPal.
For only $5.00, you can rest assured that nobody can log into your eBay or PayPal account but you. You can purchase the Security Key, a one-time password generator not much bigger than a USB key. Every time you log in to your account, it provides a different string of numbers that you append to your password. So, even if your logon is intercepted on its way across the Internet, it won’t do anyone any good because your password will be different the very next time. PayPal is selling these for next to nothing because they know people care about security, and they think $5.00 is a reasonable amount. If you use EBay or PayPal, get one to show them they’re right! While you’re at it, ask your bank why THEY don’t use something like this.