Did you know? Tuesday, 4/13 marks the first-annual Identity Management Day! Read on to learn why identity management is so important and what you can do to protect your online identity, but first, learn how you can play an important role in our awareness efforts.
To celebrate Identity Management Day on April 13, UCF InfoSec wants to highlight how identity management impacts you and what steps you can take to protect your online accounts.
- What is identity management?
Identity management determines who you are and what resources you are authorized to access. Here at UCF, when you sign in to myUCF or Webcourses, do you think about what has to happen to grant you access? Members of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) team do! They oversee the systems that reliably identify, authenticate, and authorize student and employee accounts to access university resources at the right time and for the right business reason.
- How does identity management impact me?
Think of identity management as the digital front door to UCF online resources. The IAM team is constantly improving its services to offer all users a positive, reliable experience while verifying account ownership. For example, the UCF Federated Identity Sign On page, a service IAM offers for participating websites such as but not limited to Webcourses (Canvas), Qualtrics, UCF Library Services, and Zoom, allows you to use your UCF credentials to log in to over 200 websites. Without this service, you would have to create an account for each site you needed to use and remember each one of those passwords!
- What can I do to better protect my online identity here at UCF?
Taking time to protect your online identity now can save you time and frustration later. We recommend starting with the following:
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- Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to protect your Knights email. For more information: https://infosec.ucf.edu/identity-management/multi-factor-authentication/
- Regularly check and update your personal details within myUCF: your personal email address, phone number with SMS carrier, and your direct deposit information. Update anything that’s out of date, and if any details have been changed without your knowledge, notify the Security Incident Response Team at SIRT@ucf.edu .
- Pay close attention to any notifications you receive informing you that personal information has changed. When your personal information within myUCF is changed, automated notifications are sent to your email addresses on file. If you receive a notification about a change you did not make, alert the Security Incident Response Team immediately.
- Set unique, complex passwords for each account, and never share passwords between accounts or reuse old passwords. This will help reduce the risk should one of your passwords become compromised. Password managers can help keep track of your account credentials.
UCF InfoSec and the Identity and Access Management team wish everyone a happy Identity Management Day! We are here to help, so if you have any questions about information security, please contact our office at infosec@ucf.edu .