When choosing your password for NC State or any other online account you have, following a few best practices can go a long way in keeping your account safe and secure.

• Don’t share your password with anyone for any reason
• Don’t use your NC State, Unity ID password with any other sites or services
  • For all sites, generate a random password from a Password Manager for each site and store them in your Password Manager.
  • Create a “Strong” master password for your Password Manager, or other accounts you may frequently access not stored in your Password Manager (iCloud, Gmail, Unity, et al) must be:
  • Memorable
  • Easy to type
  • Very long (16 characters or longer)
  • Variety of characters and numbers
• The easiest way to make one like this is to make up a grammatically-correct sentence about something that happened to you recently that made you laugh or upset that includes a proper noun and a number.  Sentences like this are easy to remember, start with a capital letter, include a number, and end with a punctuation mark (special character).
• If you store your password in your browser these passwords may not be secure in situations where you do not own the device.
  • Do not sync stored passwords to shared machine like Lab computers'
  • Do not accept storing your passwords while working on a public computer or shared device. 
• For University credentials, you should only use a University approved Password Manager
• Never make simple changes to your previous password for a new password.