Landonline password guidelines

LINZ undertakes a number of measures to protect your privacy, the security of your transactions and the integrity of New Zealand's only authoritative land titles register and digital cadastre.

As a user, you have an important role to play in ensuring that security controls are effective. Ultimately, you are responsible for your own behaviour when accessing agency services online.

How to be safe

Guidelines follow for each of the three components of password safety:

• Good password construction.
• Safe password management.
• Password protection.

Good password construction

Do use a password that:

• Is hard for anyone to guess (but easy for you to remember).
• Is between ten and sixteen characters.
• Contains both upper and lower case letters.

Do not use a password that is:

• Your first, middle or last name in any form.
• Your initials or a nickname.
• Your user login ID used in any form (reversed, capitalised or doubled).
• A single word – whether English or other language.
• Only one type of character: use numbers AND letters AND symbols.
• Incremental numbers (e.g., 1234 or 2468).
• Any easily-obtained information about you, such as names of a pet or child, licence plate or telephone numbers, home street name and so on.
• The same as your passphrase

Safe password management

Do:

• Change passwords regularly.

Legacy Landonline:

Users are prompted to change their password every 90 days. This is a minimum requirement – you can change it more often if you wish.
You have five grace logons to change your logon password. This is not five days but five times you log on and log off Landonline.

New Landonline:

Users get reminders to change their password in the 10 days before it expires.  If you don’t change it within that time you will be redirected from the login screen to a change password screen.

We urge you to change your password the first time you receive the prompt.  

Do not:

• Use your Landonline password as a password for anything else.
• Share your Landonline usernames and passwords with anyone. You will never be asked for your password by a legitimate system administrator.
• Attempt to enter an incorrect username and password more than five times. The system will lock a user out after five attempts to login with an invalid username / password combination. If you have forgotten your password or are locked out, you should contact LINZ Support Centre on 0800 665 463.

Password protection

Do:

• When logging in to Landonline, before entering your password, check for a closed padlock in the lower right-hand corner of your browser and that 'http:' has changed to 'https:' on the address bar. This indicates a secure channel.

LINZ advises that you ensure that firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware software has been installed on all computers used to access Landonline and that these, and your operating system, are kept updated.

Do not:

• Store your username and password within your browser.
• Write down your password anywhere that it could be found by others. If you do need to write down seldom used passwords, ensure that the paper copy is stored securely. Perhaps put it in a sealed envelope in the office safe or in a locked drawer.

For more information on Internet security, including advice on how to protect your PCs from viruses, see: