An Easy Guide for Safeguarding Your Cisco.com Account

Your Cisco.com account user ID and password provide you with access to Cisco software and to other valuable resources, as part of your Cisco Service and Support contract. Securing your account helps to prevent unauthorized individuals from using your account in fraudulent activities that could be costly to you and to Cisco.

What Security Measures Should You Take?

1. Change your Cisco.com password regularly. We suggest changing your password at a minimum of every six months.
2. Once your Cisco.com account has been created, you can use the Cisco.com Change Password tool to update your Cisco.com password at any time:
   
   tools.cisco.com/RPF/profile/profile_management.do
   
   IMPORTANT: Change your password via this link.



3. Do not loan your user ID and password to anyone.
4. Avoid creating or using shared accounts with generic user profiles.
5. Make sure you close your Web browser after logging out from Cisco.com. This is especially important if you are logging on through a shared computer.
6. Notify Cisco immediately if you believe your user ID has been compromised. To do this, go to:
   
   www.cisco.com/ciscodotcom/toolkit/submit_a_question.html
   
   Select "Profile Updates for Cisco.com" as your question type.

Guidelines for Passwords

Never write passwords down, on paper or online. Instead, create passwords that you can remember easily. One way to do this is create a password based on a song title, affirmation, or other phrase. For example, the phrase could be "This May Be One Way To Remember" and the password could be "TmB1w2R!" or "Tmb1W>r~" or some other variation. (Be sure not use either of these examples as passwords!)

Password Setting Do's

Strong passwords have the following characteristics:

• Contain both upper and lower case characters (e.g., a-z, A-Z)
• Have digits and punctuation characters as well as letters (e.g., 0-9, !@#$%^&*()_+|~ =\`{}[]:";'<>?,./)
• Are at least five alphanumeric characters long
• Are not a word in any language, and are not slang, dialect, or jargon
• Are not based on personal information, names of family members, etc.

Poor, weak passwords have the following characteristics:

• The password contains less than eight characters
• The password is a word found in a dictionary (English or foreign)
• The password is a common usage word such as:
• Names of family, pets, friends, co-workers, fantasy characters, etc.
• Computer terms and names, commands, sites, companies, hardware, software
• Birthdays and other personal information, such as addresses and phone numbers
• Word or number patterns like aaabbb, qwerty, zyxwvuts, 123321, etc.
• Any of the above spelled backwards
• Any of the above preceded or followed by a digit (e.g., secret1, 1secret)

Password Setting Don'ts

• Don't reveal a password over the phone to ANYONE
• Don't reveal a password in an e-mail message
• Don't reveal a password to your supervisor
• Don't talk about a password in front of others
• Don't hint at the format of a password (e.g., "my family name")
• Don't reveal a password on questionnaires or security forms
• Don't share a password with family members
• Don't reveal a password to co-workers while on vacation
• Don't use characters beyond the standard ASCII characters. The pound sterling symbol () has been documented to cause login problems on some systems.

Do your part today by creating strong passwords and updating your password at a minimum of every six months using the Cisco.com Change Password tool.