In this day and age where identity theft is on the rise, hackers are getting their hands on a data from all
kinds of retail stores, online shopping sites, even the postal services site. With these data breaches to user
accounts, passwords; credit card information; and other identifiable information are out of secure areas available for purchase or fraudulent uses. A lot of people will use the same username and password across most of their online accounts. So if your user account information gets hijacked from one site, they will have the information they need to access all your accounts that have the same username and password. This is a really good reason to keep changing your passwords on a regular basis.
Cambridge Public Schools has released a new policy that will require all CPS Staff and students to change their passwords every six months. This policy is active this school year. Over the next few months procedures will be put in place to enforce this policy. By April 2015, we will be requiring everyone to change their password on all CPS online accounts and network accounts. CPS will setup auto reminders to change your password on some application. Please use these reminders to remember to change all your accounts
on all applications.
The password changing procedure put in place this year is to assist in protect CPS data. The procedure states “Passwords should never be shared with others and should be changed at least every six (6) months. Passwords must be at least eight characters in length and both apha and numeric characters.” An example of a valid password would be p1a2s3s4 or pass1234. Passwords with more characters are even more secure.
ICTS highly recommends having a different password for each instance that a password is required. For
further information on password security please see the article in our previous ICTS Newsletter from 2013.