Passwords and identity protection

On this page you will find advice on how to keep your personal and confidential information safe with passwords and two-step authentication. You will also find campaign posters that you can print out and hang up.

Keep your identify safe

Your password is a lock which helps ensure that unauthorised people cannot access information that is sensitive to you or the university. But this lock only works for as long as your password is secret, and cyber criminals these days have tools that can decode or crack passwords.

This is why we use two-step authentication. Two-step authentication ensures that it is you who is signing in and not just somebody who has guessed or stolen your password. This security is essential – also on your private email account and social media accounts.

Because if cyber criminals can access one of your accounts, the risk is they will access more.

Creating passwords and protecting your identity

Create a good password

At AU, you are required to have a strong password that is difficult for others to guess. Your password must:

be at least 12 characters
not contain æ, ø or å
not contain spaces
contain both upper-case and lower-case letters as well as one of there special characters: ~!@#$%^&*_-+=`|(){}[]:;"'<>,.?/

A good password must be difficult to guess but easy for you to remember. So a good idea is to create a password that is made up of parts of an entire sentence, which is easy to remember. This is known as a pass phrase.

Read more about how to create a pass phrase.

Never use your AU password for other accounts

The password you use to sign in to AU systems must only be used here. If you use the same password for your home WiFi, your Netflix account and your LinkedIn profile, for example, cyber criminal will have free rein over your information, provided they can crack the code in one place.

Change passwords that are not secret

If you have even the slightest suspicion that unauthorised people may know your password, make sure you change it immediately.

AU continually checks that there are no public leaks of your primary user login at AU.

If you wish to check whether your private passwords have been leaked, you can visit the website haveibeenpwned.com.

Always use two-step authentication when you sign in

Two-step authentication is a tool to check whether it is actually you who is trying to sign in to your account. You will typically be asked to confirm it is you using your mobile phone. In practice, this is the only effective way to prevent others from impersonating you online. Almost all logins with an AU account now use two-step authentication, but in some cases it is still only an option. We encourage you to take advantage of this option wherever possible.

For your own and the university’s sake, we also recommend that you turn on two-step authentication for your private email account, social media accounts and all other accounts that require you to sign in with a password. Your identity is a gateway to both personal and sensitive information, and you can keep this information safe by using two-step authentication.

Find a guide to activating two-step authentication on a number of popular services on sikkerdigital.dk. (In Danish only.)