We’ve made some changes to the login system for the Account Manager that are now live on our production Account Manager.  I’d like to outline what those changes are and the reasons we made them.

What the changes are

• The next time you log in to the Account Manager (or go to the Account Manager if you had your account set to “Remember Me”), you will be prompted to migrate your password.
• During this migration you will be prompted to enter your current password, followed by a new password two times.
• You will also be prompted to enter a Security Question and a Security Question Answer.  The question is a freeform text field that you can put whatever question or other information you like.  This “question” will be given to you as a prompt during the “Forgot Password” procedure.  The answer is the data you will be prompted to enter as the answer to your question.

Why we are making these changes

There are a number of reasons why these changes are being put into place.  First of all, we are using a new method of storing user passwords that provides additional security and utilizes a different hashing mechanism than we used before.  Some additional reasons for this change are:

• We are consolidating user records in our system.  When this process is complete, customer admin accounts and end user accounts will be consolidated into one system to allow for consistency across our systems.
• We will be adding in functionality to allow customers to designate additional administrators.  These additional administrator accounts can be set up as full-fledged account administrators or can be given access to various areas of the Account Manager, including fine grain control down to the server and/or domain level.
• We will be consolidating the quarantine system into the Account Manager, making one place where users log in to see their quarantine and manage their account.  Since we released custom branding options for our customers, the need for a separate quarantine site that is under a different brand has diminished.

At this time, the only changes that have been made have been to migrate existing customer admin accounts to the new user system and add the additional security measures surrounding logins to the site.  As we release additional changes we will post about them here on the blog.

Please comment here or contact support@purity.net if you have any questions or issues with the new system.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 7:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.