Thousands of staff members and students will need to change their UG password in the next weeks. Those that haven’t done so before June 1 will face access restrictions.
The first announcement was posted on MyUniversity and Student Portal on April 13. Emails from the Center for Information Technology (CIT) followed shortly after. CIT asked staff and students to change their eight-character password to a more complicated one of fourteen characters.
The major password change is part of a bigger operation to improve the cyber security of the whole institute. However, until now only 50 percent of the staff members have complied. Among students the number is even lower. It is estimated that only 30 percent of students changed their passwords.
‘We urge everyone not to wait until June 1’, says Sander van Lien from CIT, ‘and to change their password now at a time that suits them.’
Re-activate
Those who don’t do so will be locked out of their account on June 1 and forced to do so. However, he says, ‘it will be easy to re-activate just by changing the password even when restrictions are applied’.
Considering the risk of huge numbers of students re-activating their accounts altogether in June, the CIT decided also to use additional servers to minimise the eventual problems.
More adjustments are being made to make UG more cyber secure. The multi-factor authentication that the board of the university announced last year will reach full implementation in July.