Change Your Email Password Before November 15th!

You need to use your email password to have off-campus access to library resources such as Ebsco. You also use this password to access Desire2Learn (D2L).

The University is asking all students, faculty & staff to change their e-mail passwords to make them more difficult for hackers to guess. See the message below from Ken Splittgerber, Chief Information Officer, for more details.

Go to the Password Change site to pick a new password. See below for the increased requirements for passwords.

If you waited until after November 15th, your password is automatically re-set to your 7 digit Campus ID. If this happened, go to the password change site, and enter your 7 digit Campus ID in the "Old Password" box, then pick a new password, and type it again to Validate the New Password. (Your 7 digit Campus ID is found on your TitanCard. If you do not know your 7 digit Campus ID, you will need to call the Registrar (920-424-3454) or the Help Desk (920-424-3020) and they can provide it to you.)

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The requirements for email passwords are as follows:

• At least 7 characters
• Not a word found in the system dictionary
• Not the same as the username
• No consecutive same characters
• At least one character from three of the following categories:
  • Upper Case (A-Z)
  • Lower Case (a-z)
  • Numbers (1-9)
  • Special characters (!@#$%^&*_+,-./)

Valid examples:

• abcDef7 (1-upper case, 5-lower case, 1-number)
• R@berts (1-upper case, 5-lower case, 1-special character)
• @Bcdefg (1-upper case, 5-lower case, 1-special character)
• A@a5678 (1-upper case, 1-lower case, 4-numbers, 1-special character)

Invalid examples:

• ab12@$ (2-lower case, 2-numbers, 2-special characters) but fewer than 7 characters.
• Abcde77 (1-upper case, 4-lower case, 2-numbers) but the 2-numbers are consecutive same characters.
• @bcdefg (6-lower case, 1-special character) but only two of the four categories were used.

 

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This message was sent to the campus community on November 1st, 2007 from Ken Splittgerber, Chief Information Officer:

Summary

For security reasons explained below, the University is asking all faculty, staff, and students to change their email passwords to meet the University's new "hardened" standards. The standards are explained below. Please change your Titanmail password by November 15, 2007. If you need assistance, you can contact the Help Desk at 424-3020.

Notes:

(1) The next time you use TitanMail, please change your password before you enter your username and password. Click on the words "Change Password" which are located just below the "Log In" button.

(2) This does not affect your Novell login - students use Novell to access lab computers. Faculty and staff use Novell daily when they login their work computer.

(3) This does not affect your TitanWeb/PeopleSoft login.

(4) Your email username and password are used for Desire2Learn (D2L), TitanFiles, and off-campus access to library databases. These systems will immediately use the new email password when you change it.

Details

Recently, UW Oshkosh's email accounts have been targeted by a group using an automated method to guess account passwords. The group has successfully discovered the passwords for several accounts. These compromised email accounts are being used to send thousands of spam e-mail messages. When excessive email spam originates from UW Oshkosh accounts, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can, and will, blacklist the entire uwosh.edu domain. The result is that an ISP such as Time Warner Inc.'s America Online (AOL), will block all UW Oshkosh email from reaching their customers. In the past, a few Internet Service Providers have blacklisted email from UW Oshkosh.

The requirements for email passwords are as follows:

• At least 7 characters
• Not a word found in the system dictionary
• Not the same as the username
• No consecutive same characters
• At least one character from three of the following categories:
  • Upper Case (A-Z)
  • Lower Case (a-z)
  • Numbers (1-9)
  • Special characters (!@#$%^&*_+,-./)

Valid examples:

abcDef7 (1-upper case, 5-lower case, 1-number)
R@berts (1-upper case, 5-lower case, 1-special character)
@Bcdefg (1-upper case, 5-lower case, 1-special character)
A@a5678 (1-upper case, 1-lower case, 4-numbers, 1-special character)

Invalid examples:

ab12@$ (2-lower case, 2-numbers, 2-special characters) but fewer than 7 characters.
Abcde77 (1-upper case, 4-lower case, 2-numbers) but the 2-numbers are consecutive same characters.
@bcdefg (6-lower case, 1-special character) but only two of the four categories were used.