Secure Passwords are Important
Since the end of the last AFL season, our site has been under a steady attack from spammers, black hat hackers, and others. With considerable time and effort, we've managed to defeat all of the attempts so far. Not a single user account has been compromised and none of your personal information is at risk. We intend to keep it that way but we need your cooperation.
It is imperative that you have a secure password on all of the web sites you visit including ours. Our site stores all passwords in an encrypted form so even if our files were breached you have some level of safety but given enough time any system can be broken. All users can do this by logging in, going to your "My Account" page and making a change to a more secure password. Here are some suggestions for passwords NOT TO USE:
admin admin123 123456 123123 123456789 password password1 1password 1234 root 1234567 12345 qwerty welcome pass abc123 12345678 1111 111111 test monkey iloveyou dragon demo editor moderator writer letmein baseball trustno1 sunshine master shadow ashley football afl afana aussie aussierules aussierulez australia australian jesus michael ninja mustang
Also, do NOT use your first name, last name, your children's names, your spouse's names, any family names on Facebook or other social sites, your city, your userid or username, etc.
Do NOT use ordinary and common dictionary words or birth dates.
The spammers are sponging common info off of other sources such as Facebook and trying these, too. Given enough attempts they WILL break common passwords and compromise this site and others. The bad hackers are using computer programs to try every possibility they can, they don't need to sit and type each possibility!
A safer password meets these criteria:
- Meets all above "NOT" to do requirements
- At least 8 characters long, preferably 12 or more.
- Uses at least two numbers and special characters (#$%^_& etc.)
We fully realize that remembering these type of passwords is not easy. In order to make this easier we suggest one of the following password creation and storage tools: LastPass, KeePass, Roboform, and for Firefox: the Password Hasher add-in. Any of these can create and remember suitable passwords for AFANA.com and other sites.
At some point in the future, we may enforce this as a site requirement. If you need to change your password, we suggest you do it now while this is fresh in your mind.
All users can do this by logging in, going to your "My Account" page and making a change. (The link is under your username in the inner right hand column.) While we can change passwords for you, we cannot recover or see any current password in the system and we cannot possibly do this for even a small percentage of users. It is best if you do this yourself. If you have any problems, please let us know via our on site contact form or e-mail.
Article last changed on Saturday, October 07, 2017 - 8:30 AM EDT