Please note that as of March 31st, all students will be prompted to change their password and the new password must be a minimum of 9-characters in length. Moving forward, students will be expected to renew their password every 180 days. To change your password now, please access the link here: https://adfs.hcdsb.org/adfs/portal/updatepassword/
To get you thinking about a solid password, check out these websites: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords – This website will tell you if your “secret” password has ever been collected in a data breach. If you find your password or a past password on the list, it does not mean that your data was compromised, but it does mean that your “secure” password is commonly known to hackers!
It will likely surprise no one that the password “123456” is not secure! Amazingly though, that password has been common in over 24 million data breaches! Unfortunately, millions of people are using simplistic passwords that can be cracked in seconds.
This is why HCDSB’s IT Department is establishing new expectations about our passwords and that starts with a new protocol that begins on March 31st!
To get you thinking about password safety, check out this website that estimates how long it would take a computer to hack your password based on complexity: https://howsecureismypassword.net/
As an example, if your password was “Leafs67”, a hacker could break the password in about a minute. Now, if your password was “L#@fs67&NeverAgain!”, it would take 5 hundred quadrillion (500,000,000,000,000,000) years for a hacker to break it (or about the same time it may take for the Leafs to win again!).
Finally, this website encourages individuals to use a passphrase instead of a password: https://www.useapassphrase.com/. A passphrase skips on all of the numbers and symbols, but because it is longer and the words are unrelated, it is equally hard for a hacker to crack!
Please consider how you can protect your data and privacy with improved password hygiene and be ready to be prompted to change your school password in the coming week.
If you would like to update your password early, please click the link to start the process: https://adfs.hcdsb.org/adfs/portal/updatepassword/
