Picking a New Password

You may want to choose a new password for your account on wilkes, especially if you're still using your initial temporary password. To change your password, use this command in the terminal after ssh-ing into wilkes:

  passwd

It will prompt you for your current password (which might be the temporary one you first used to log in) and then ask you to enter your new password twice.

It's very important that you pick a secure password.

Bad actors constantly scan all computers connected to the internet (including both knuth and wilkes.cs.hmc.edu) and try to log in with hundreds or thousands of plausible usernames and passwords. If you pick a weak password then there's a high probability your account will be compromised. And once hackers have a toehold on a machine, they can use that to scan the inside of the network and potentially access other machines as well, or exploit other vulnerabilities. So pick a good password!