A quick note on password security:

Recently there have been a number of attacks on online systems in the news. Citibank, Google and Sony  are only some of the examples of high profile companies whose systems were broken into and sensitive information was stolen. But on almost any server on the internet, large or small, automated programs are regularly trying to hack into the system, guess passwords or find holes in firewalls.  

It is therefore very important to make sure that sites are secured and passwords are not easy to guess for bots and spiders crawling the web.  

We have implemented a number of security measures to protect our systems, including minimum requirements for passwords used on our systems. This is not intended to make it difficult to log in but to protect our and our customers’ data.  

We also ask our users to remember the following rules regarding passwords:

  • If passwords must be written down on a piece of paper, store the paper in a secure place and destroy it when it is no longer needed.
  • Never share passwords with anyone.
  • Use different passwords for all user accounts.
  • Change passwords immediately if they may have been compromised.
  • Be careful about where passwords are saved on computers. Some dialog boxes, such as those for remote access and other telephone connections, present an option to save or remember a password. Selecting this option poses a potential security threat. 

Our minimum complexity requirements are:

  • The password cannot be equivalent to your login name
  • The password is at least six characters long
  • The password contains characters from at least three of the following five categories:
      1. English uppercase characters (A - Z)
      2. English lowercase characters (a - z)
      3. Base 10 digits (0 - 9)
      4. Non-alphanumeric (For example: !, $, #, or %)
      5. Unicode characters

(source: Microsoft Technet, passwords best practice,)

For your information, the most frequently used passwords on the internet are:

  1. 123456
  2. 12345
  3. 123456789
  4. Password
  5. iloveyou
  6. princess
  7. rockyou
  8. 1234567
  9. 12345678
  10. abc123

 according to Imperva

Another – very entertaining - list of 500 most frequently used passwords can be found at

http://www.whatsmypass.com/the-top-500-worst-passwords-of-all-time