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Password Rules
| Passwords, by their very nature, should be difficult to guess. Passwords can be guessed by a person putting in random guesses or by a computer program going sequentially through every word in the dictionary, or spelling out made up words sequentially, ie, starting at aaa, then aab, then aac, etc, until it hits on the right answer. | ||
| In HOPS, passwords are case sensitive, so if your password is 'Railway', it will not match 'railway' or 'RAILWAY' or 'RaIlWaY' or any other capitalisation of the word apart from 'Railway'. This makes it a lot harder for a person to guess your password as there are now tens, if not hundreds, of possibilities of capitalisation for every word in the dictionary. | ||
| Passwords also have to be at least eight characters long, as that means there will be at least 52 to the power of 8 (53,459,728,531,456 (53 trillion!)) combinations of password possibilities, and that's if we only count the letters A-Z in lowercase and capitals! | ||
| Ideally passwords should not be easy-to-guess words such as your name or the name of your pet or the town you live in or the railway you work on (to make them difficult for people to guess or work out). Ideally passwords should contain upper and lower case letters and numbers (to make them difficult for malicious computer programs to crack). Passwords could also be simple sentences. For example 'myfavouritelocoisearlbathurst' is more secure than 'abc123'. You should NEVER share your password with anyone else, this includes anyone at your railway, including your railway's HOPS Administrator, or the central HOPS Administration. Your railway's HOPS Administrator and central HOPS Administration have methods of logging in as you without the need to know your password. | ||
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