IT people seem to forget that one of the cornerstones of good security procedures is not making them overly burdensome. If the task becomes too onerous then the users will find ways to circumvent it and then you have an even bigger security hole. I'm betting that lots of folks on Megan's system have a list of 6 passwords written on a post it in their office somewhere and that they just round robin through them.
I flat out told our IT person that my password was Password with a changing number and that, until I didn't have these ridiculous procedures, I wasn't planning on changing it.
Of course, with me, the bigger burden for someone trying to login as me would be spelling my name.
I won't even get into how insecure that type of user name system is. All some needs to do is get a company directory and they have everyone's username.
First you FCM the hokey pokey, now we are porning potato chips?
You know what comes next don't you? Salad shooters.
Muffalettas being too obvious since the name is almost porny anyway.
We have to have so many characters, including at least one upper-case letter, one lower-case letter, one number, and one "special character." I sort of do like megan does -- I have a "base password" and change one number each time I have to change the password.
I'm betting that lots of folks on Megan's system have a list of 6 passwords written on a post it in their office somewhere and that they just round robin through them.
I once told an IT guy, "you can let me have the same password, or I can write it down. You decided which is the most secure"
In TV news, I'll admit to not really watching Daily Show/Colbert Report since they've returned without their writers (not because of strike support, it's just that I don't think they're as funny without the writers). However, I'll have to search up the full episode of the Colbert Report from the 22nd, just so I can see the strike show, complete with an interview with Andrew Young about the 1969 strike he helped to settle with a hospital administrator named James Colbert--Stephen's dad. The link has some clips from the show that I'll have to watch tonight.
Is anyone else amazed that today is only Tuesday?
Plus, our password changes every three months and it has to have caps and numbers and can't match the previous five.
Ours changes every three months, has to be between 8 and 13 characters long, has to have caps, numbers, and symbols, and I don't think we can re-use passwords at all.
This confuses the less tech-savvy among our interns so much that I've taken to teaching them how to construct passwords: "Say your mother's name is Jane and she was born in 1929. So make your password Jane@1929 or Jane1929! and you're good to go. Really any person or event that you associate with a date or other number, and stick an exclamation point on the end. Just don't do YOUR name or birthday, SSN, or whatever, because that's kinda dumb."
