12 Character Password Required

In an effort to protect the Sentara Health enterprise and our consumers from cyber security threats, we are continually evaluating opportunities to advance our internal and external cyber security capabilities. The improvements are aimed at strengthening our organizational posture to enable a more resilient health plan.

As a result, we will move from an 8-character network password to a 12-character network password policy, effective September 13, 2023. The policy will take effect on the user’s next required password rotation and includes the provider portal.

The policy change is being implemented to address the vulnerability of short passwords. To demonstrate this business risk, our current 8-character password can potentially be hacked within 2 minutes vs. a 12-character password which would take an estimated 226 years to hack. Increasing the password length and complexity mitigates the ease that criminals can crack passwords

Below are the new network passwords requirements:

• 12 characters.
• Mix of lower- and upper-case letters.
• Numbers.
• Special characters.