Creating a strong password is key to protecting your personal information at Taft College. Beyond the minimum required password length, ITS recommends several best practices to help strengthen your login credentials for your Taft College network, system and e-mail accounts:

• • • Use a minimum of 12 characters. In general, the longer and more diverse a password is, the more difficult it will be for an attacker to crack it.
    • Use a variety of characters including numbers, upper case letters, lower case letters and special characters (e.g. ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & *).
    • Create a passphrase. Passphrases are phrases that you can easily remember and can also be translated into characters. For example, the phrase “I saw Cougie the Cougar at Taft College in 2019” can be translated to “IsCtC@tCi2019”.
    • Never share with others. Anyone with access to your password has access to your personal information, and therefore can impersonate you online. This includes being able to alter your financial information, make purchases, send emails addressed as you, etc.
    • Use different passwords for different accounts. If the same password is used across multiple applications and an attacker manages to get access to your password, they can then compromise all of your accounts with that one password. Using different passwords for different applications ensures that all of your accounts won’t be compromised if one of your passwords is cracked.
    • Change your password periodically. Changing a password periodically allows for less time for attackers to obtain a particular password.