Changing your password for whatever reason, is never fun. You have to go through and change every website, every account, any place where that password is, you need to change. Along with that, memorizing it can be a hassle, especially if it’s got all these requirements about 12 characters long with at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter, one number, and one special character.
On Jan. 8, that is what students had to do during Nest Time instead of traveling to other classes. No one really knew the reason for this need of a password change for everyone, besides the teachers, who got an email from Liberty’s technology department representative Kurt Unger. The email stated that phishing attacks are common on schools and school districts, and to always make sure that any time it asks you to complete a two-factor authentication form (2FA) that you complete it to give your password extra security.
WSD rolled out a new policy that affected three of the four high schools, excluding Holt.
“It’s not like Holt was left out, I think they’re just doing it here and then they’re going to do it at the rest of schools later,” Unger said.
This password change was a struggle for some of the students, some of whom could not successfully change their password, and some of whom couldn’t get into the website to change their password. However, one criteria that the district put in place for this password change, which brought some students to support it more was that the students were able to choose their own password; which brought some alerts to the administrators of the schools, not knowing what students will choose.
“I had maybe a handful of students that couldn’t get logged back in after their passwords changed, but I have a setup where they can change it, with a authentication code that I give them,” Unger said. “In February, they’re letting middle schoolers change passwords, which I’m interested to know how that will turn out, we didn’t have many problems here however.”
Whenever it comes to password changes, one of if the not the main reason for a password change, is cybersecurity. At the point in our society, there is technology for everything, and there is technology that is able to steal personal information of random people. The cybersecurity class at Liberty, has a full unit on passwords, and what makes a password weak and strong. Cybersecurity students agree with the district policy that we should change our passwords to whatever we want as it will create another massive layer of security to students personal information.
“It’s a huge deal that I’m surprised they haven’t done it sooner, because if someone in our school wanted to hack someone’s password, they could find their lunch pin and know their email, and get into their account super easy,” Davies said. “But now that you can make your own passwords, it’s impossible to get into one specific account.”
With the technology that we have today, it is super easy for a computer to find a password of someone, especially if it is a very weak password, such as “1234” or “Password” and will take a computer seconds to get all your information. However, if you create your own password with different numbers and special characters it could take a computer hundreds of years to crack your password.
It is very important that everyone has a strong password especially within the school district. This is because if a hacker gets your password, they have free reign of all your personal information, such as, your address, parents names and phone numbers, medical records, and so much more personal information that shouldn’t be out there in public.
“If I got phished, I have a lot more access than a student, so they can get into using my information for whatever reason, a list of every student, every email address, every phone number, every home address, and all your contacts and everything,” Unger said.
