How To Create a Strong Password

Before you Begin 

This article will provide you with information on how to create a strong password

  • Your Edmonds College student and employee email account requires you to have a strong password.

For our system, a strong password will be:

  • A minimum of eight characters in length.
  • Use characters from three (3) of the four (4) main character sets
    • Upper case alphabetic (A, B, C,...Z)
    • Lower case alphabetic (a, b, c,...z)
    • Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2...9)
    • Non-alphanumeric characters. (-, ?, =, etc...)
  • While all security is important, your password should also be easy for you to remember.

Note: We have found one of the non-alphanumeric characters that will not work in a password. The character is the 'at' ( @ ) symbol. Do not use the at sign as one of the characters in your Strong Password.  Your password may not contain your account user name or the first and last name associated with your account.

Additional Tips

  1. A good Strong Password is not a recognizable word or a word as you have seen with a few numbers substituted for letters. Unfortunately, these are exactly the words the criminals know about and are the first ones tried to break into a computer system.

Examples and Suggestions

  • Think of a phrase you use often or the title of a song you remember easily. If it has eight or more words in it, take the first letter of each word as the basis for your password. Mix the case of the letters and change a letter or two to a number or special character. There is a song titled "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree". This would produce a base password of 'tayrrtoot'. You could change the case of the first letter and the vowels for special characters and create a Strong Password: T{yrrt**t
  • Make up a totally nonsensical word combining upper and lower case letters and numbers. Candidates might be: 1Formdot or tarWindo5
  • You could join two unrelated words with a number or special character and create a Strong Password, such as: Bop2try or bear_7Brother.
  • Now, a word of caution: do not use the examples given in this document. We have just given the criminals some new words to add to their vocabulary and dictionaries to try on our system.

The principles covered in this article can be used for your other accounts. Just be sure not to use the same password across all of your accounts, as it creates a major security risk. This is an opportunity for you to put your creative genius to work. Create your own unique Strong Password!