Ravi Pendse, vice president for information technology, and Sol Bermann, chief information security officer, sent an email to all faculty, staff and students across the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses, as well as Michigan Medicine, officials said in a statement Tuesday. The message included instructions for accessing the self-service password change page.
Officials advised that if the Sept. 12 deadline is missed to reset passwords, an intricate account-recovery process will be necessary to regain access.
The reuse of previous passwords was prohibited, the release noted.
The mandate comes week after the university announced that Internet access had been mostly restored to all of its campuses after a two-day outage prompted by a cybersecurity threat on Aug. 27.
The disruption affected the first and second days of fall semester at the state's largest university, along with its regional campus at UM Dearborn. Michigan Medicine, the university's hospital system, was not affected, and UM Flint was largely unaffected, officials said.
The university's leaders, however, refused to be more specific about what led to the "significant security threat."
Password tool assistance and additional resources were available on the school's Information and Technology Services website and the ITS Service Center for further support, officials said.
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