The most important part of password security is keeping your password private. Do not give your Clark account information to others and do not login with your credentials and let others use your resources.
Changing your Password
If you use a Clark Mac as your primary computer, use these instructions to change your password.
All other users, click here to change your Clark password.
Tips for Changing your Password
Because we store passwords for so many things — like logging in, accessing email, connecting to the VPN and wireless — it is not uncommon to experience issues logging in to services for a day or two following a password change.
- Think about the services you access at Clark and the devices you access them from before you change your password. Your password will probably need to be updated on each of those devices. For example, we check our email on our Clark computers, personal laptops, iPads, and cell phones. When we changed our password recently we needed to update all of the email programs on each device.
- Whenever possible, change your password on campus, with a wired connection.
- If you have to change your password from off-campus, connect to the VPN first. Click here for information on connecting to the VPN.
- Depending on how you change your password, you may end up in a situation where you have to supply your old password for some things and new one for others. This should resolve once you return to campus. If not, please contact the Help Desk.
- If you get locked out of your account, don’t despair. Accounts automatically unlock after two hours (assuming wrong passwords haven’t been tried again) or if we are available at the Help Desk, we can unlock them right away for you.
Strong Passwords
Having a strong password is important. A strong password is defined as at least 14 characters long, and must contain characters from at least 3 of the following 4 classes: upper case letters, lower case letters, Arabic numerals, and special characters (except for the apostrophe ‘).
Having a strong password will help protect your account from people who might try and gain access by guessing at passwords people usually chose from (pet names, home towns, family members, etc).
Whenever you receive a new password for any account it is always a good idea to change it. There may be times that the default password you are given is not secure because of the manner in which it was selected or generated. It is also a good idea to change any passwords you have on at least a yearly basis. Doing so will help keep your identify safe by minimizing the chances that someone might guess or discover your password and then be able to use it to access your account.
- Minimum password length of 8 characters, suggested length of 14
- Cannot be one of your previous five passwords
- Cannot contain three or more characters from the user’s account name
- Cannot contain spaces or non-English characters
- Will expire 365 days after it was set
- Must contain 3 of the following categories of special characters except for the apostrophe ‘
- Uppercase English letter (A to Z)
- Lowercase English letter (a to z)
- Number 0 to 9
- Non-alphanumeric (!, #, $, & , =, etc…)
Don’t forget to change your password in locations that may remember it (i.e. wireless settings, VPN client, mobile email clients).