Choosing Safe Passwords
Choosing safe passwords helps protect the security of your data and the entire Smith College network. For security reasons, most servers will not allow you to reuse any password that you have used in the past - ever. Most servers also require you to change your password at regular intervals, so choosing passwords wisely each time is very important.
Note also that on Sophia and AIS, passwords are case-sensitive. Always pay attention to whether you are using upper case or lower case characters when changing your password on those servers.
Your password should not be a word, proper name, or place name in any language on the planet. Computer readable dictionaries of every language are routinely used by crackers, which means that your mother's maiden name in Urdu will be as easily cracked as any simple English word. It must not be any simple combination of two shorter words, or any word in reverse, or any word slightly misspelled. All of these combinations are broken easily. (It is easy to program a computer to discover these.)
Your password should not be the name of any real or fictional character in any book, movie, play, comic book, or musical work. All of these, along with any variations in spelling, are easily cracked. The fact that a character name is obscure means nothing. They are all crackable, effortlessly.
Your password must be at least five characters long, up to a maximum of eight characters. We strongly recommend using the full eight characters.
Your password should be a mixture of letters and numbers. (For Banner users: the first character cannot be a number.)
The ideal password is as random as possible, with no apparent meaning whatsoever. If it looks like you typed it by throwing small rocks at your keyboard from 10 feet away, it's probably a good enough password.
Yes, we know those are hard to remember. How about something like your favorite ice cream flavor broken up with your favorite lottery number: m8i5n3t, or your favorite color backwards broken up with your shoe size: tel7oiv5. This approach might be easier to remember and would still be very hard to crack.
Back to top >>