Not GoRams. Or Go_Rams. Or gorams. Or GoRams!

Picking a strong password is critical and cannot be emphasized enough. We all have passwords we use regularly online whether they are for e-mail accounts, banking purposes or for our Facebook and other social media accounts. Beyond the importance of having your personal information and accounts protected, it is equally important to have strong passwords for your CSU social media accounts.

Hacked Account

Earlier this year an official CSU athletic Twitter account was hacked into and understandably caused quite a stir. The Twitter account is now back in the possession of the CSU department that primarily manages the account but it was an unfortunate (but good) lesson in password choice.

I highly recommend avoiding obvious phrases such as “gorams” or “csurams” as your account passwords. These phrases make it easy for someone to guess your password and take control of your account.

I am not an expert on password choice or online security but it seems the basic guidelines of password choice are to make the password 8-12 characters in length, use a variety of characters (%&!#@), and use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters.

Password Resources

For expert advice, I encourage you to check out the following articles and heed password advice.

• Steve Tranby’s How to Securely Manage Your Online Identity
• Lifehacker’s How to Update Your Insecure Passwords and Make Them Easy to Use
• Lifehacker’s Choose (and Remember) Great Passwords

Go Rams!… but not in your password.