Creating Strong Passwords

Passwords should contain:

• At least 8 characters
• At least 2 special characters (e.g., *$#-^)
• At least 2 numeric characters (placed after the first, but before the last, character of the password)
• A mix of upper (A-Z) & lower (a-z) case letters

Passwords should NOT contain:

• Personal information (e.g., name, nickname, birth date, child's name, pet's name, phone number, etc.)
• Keyboard patterns (e.g., qwerty or asdfg)
• Sequential numbers (e.g., 123*567) or letters
• Words associated with your school (e.g., bevo, aggie, gig'em)
• Words or acronyms that can be found in any kind of dictionary (e.g., specialist, foreign language, and technical jargon)
• Blank spaces

Note: Strong passwords are NOT easily guessed.

How to create a strong, memorable password:

1. Think of a sentence or phrase that’s easy for you to remember, and difficult for others to guess. For example: “We Always Eat Pancakes On Sunday.”
2. Convert your sentence to a password that contains the first letter of each word in the sentence. Using the example above, you’d get “waepos.”
3. Add complexity by making some of the letters uppercase and adding in or substituting numbers and special characters for some of the letters. Example: “we 6 ^lways Eat 8 Pancakes *n sunday” would become “w6^E8Pk*s”

Tip: Deliberately misspelling one or more words can make your password harder to crack.