Your Swarthmore “credentials”, the combination of your Swarthmore email address and password, should only be used with Swarthmore College on-line services.  These credentials should never be used for personal accounts at non-Swarthmore websites.

Websites are regularly compromised and users email addresses, along with passwords, are subsequently stolen.  A short list of popular websites that were recently compromised follows:

eHarmony
LinkedIn
Last.fm
Yahoo Voices
The Student Room
Formspring
Android Forum
techradar
Philips
Sony Entertainment
etc…

If you use your Swarthmore credentials for a non-Swarthmore account and that website gets hacked, your Swarthmore on-line services would then be readily available to the attacker(s).  Since lists of compromised accounts are often sold or simply pasted on-line for anyone to access, it’s only a matter of time before someone is using them to gain access to your account.

So, to keep your Swarthmore resources private, don’t use your Swarthmore email address and password at other third party sites.  Use different login credentials for all your personal accounts.