Your User Account

College

On joining the College you will be assigned a College User Account, this is used for College Email, ‘My Birkbeck’, eduroam WiFi, and login into College centrally managed computers. These will most likely be Windows, and can be identified by the domain, which will be CCSACADEMIC.

More information on College Usernames can be found here:

Department

You will also be gievn a Department account, this is solely for Departmental computers, both workstations and servers. We will, if we can, use the same UserID as assigned by the College. There will be an email address associated with this account and it will automatically be forwarded to your College email address.

To change your Department account password, you need to be logged into a Department computer and then use:

https://pwd.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/

Passwords

Hints for choosing a good password

  1. take two short words and combine them with a number or punctation character.

  2. choose a line from a song , poem and use the first letter of each word. e.g o rose thou art sick. the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm, ( william blake) would give a password ortastiw

  3. use an acronym that’s special to you. e.g. roses are red violets are blue, i live up stairs and so do you. would give a password rarvabilusasdy

  4. alternate between one consonant and one or two vowels, up to seven or eight characters. this provides nonsense words which are usually pronounceable, and thus easily remembered.

Bad passwords

  1. don’t use a password which you think anyone could guess

  2. don’t use your login id or any string derived from it. e.g if your id is ubcgxyz -> don’t use passwords like zyxgcbu or zyxubcg xyzxyz ubcgzxy1

  3. don’t use any other login id as a password.

  4. don’t use names of any form as a password.

  5. don’t use any of your names / nicknames as a password

  6. don’t use any names of friends, colleagues, partners, pets, children etc…

  7. don’t use names of fictional characters e.g. gandalf

  8. don’t use the names of computers or operating systems.

  9. don’t use the address / serial numbers of computers.

  10. don’t use your or the departments phone number.

  11. don’t use your or the departments postal code.

  12. don’t use anyones birthday.

  13. don’t use any information which is easily obtained about you or the department/college.

  14. don’t use any word in the english dictionary.

  15. don’t use any word in a foreign dictionary.

  16. don’t use obscenities, english or foreign.

  17. don’t use a place name.

  18. don’t use a proper noun.

  19. don’t use passwords of all the same letter. e.g zzzzz aaa

  20. don’t use a simple pattern on the keyboard. e.g. asdfg

  21. don’t use any of the example passwords used in this document.

  22. don’t use any of the above spelled backwards.

  23. don’t use any of the above followed or preceded by a single digit.

Good passwords

good passwords are difficult to guess but easy to remember.

  1. seven or eight characters long.

  2. on unix systems use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters.

  3. You should be able to type a password quickly so someone cannot learn your password by watching your fingers on the keyboard (called shoulder surfing).

Don’t write down your password, but if you must

like bank card pin numbers, password should not be written down. However if you do write it down these precautions could help prevent anyone from finding your password ( or pin number):

  1. don’t attach password to the computer, terminal etc.

  2. don’t leave the written password any where people could easily find it.

  3. don’t identify the password as a password e.g. don’t write iona password = 12x9d6b8

  4. don’t include the name or address of the computer on the same piece of paper.

  5. mix in some other characters or scramble the written version of the password in a way that is easy for you to remember but makes it hard for anyone else.