Happy New Year! Still trying to come up with a New Year’s resolution? How about committing to using secure passwords this year? The beginning of a new year is a great time to clean house of all the old and often used passwords and start fresh. This applies not only at work, but also for all the personal accounts we use (think Facebook, Twitter, online banking, credit cards, etc.). A secure password is at least 8 characters long, doesn’t contain your username or real name, doesn’t contain a complete word, is different from previous passwords, and uses all of the following: uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.

Changing passwords, especially passwords you’ve used forever isn’t easy, but there are tools that can help. Password managers can be great resources to assist you with remembering and managing all your different passwords. There’s a lot of different choices out there, but I’ll highlight the 2 that I use personally. LastPass is a browser plugin that can be installed on any browser and on any device to assist with saving and auto filling passwords for all of your web accounts. To keep all your passwords with you in your pocket, OneSafe is a great mobile app (working across IOS, Andriod, and Windows Phone) for saving any sensitive information. OneSafe uses military grade encryption to protect your personal information while keeping it all right there at your fingertips. With the start of the new year, please consider a new password as your New Year’s resolution.

We discussed VPN and Remote Desktop in a previous tech tip, but with the winter weather now here, the threat of campus closures becomes real. If UK is closed because of the snow or bitter cold, you can still get to your office desktop and all of your work files by using the Campus VPN client and remote desktop. We’ve created a series of tutorials to help you through the process. See below to get started:

• Using VPN & Remote Desktop on a Mac 
  • VPN - https://www.as.uky.edu/tutorials/configuring-vpn-mac-os-107-and-higher 
  • Remote Desktop - https://www.as.uky.edu/tutorials/using-remote-desktop-connecting-mac-office-pc 

• Using VPN & Remote Desktop on a PC  
  • VPN - https://www.as.uky.edu/tutorials/downloading-installing-and-using-campus-vpn-client-windows 
  • Remote Desktop - https://www.as.uky.edu/tutorials/using-remote-desktop-home-pc-office-pc 

As always, if you need technical assistance from the Hive or need to request one of the other services offered from the Hive, please submit a request via the Hive Forms https://resources.as.uky.edu/hive-forms