Hell, I don't even know my passwords. My password manager does. Sometimes I forget the main password but thankfully my fingers don't, unless I start thinking about it.
How do you use your password manager to log into your PC. I mean with the AD password you're changing monthly with "high complexity"? Cause that's the actual problem scenario in enterprises.
If someone asks me to change some normal password, I really don't care, just like you (cause password manager), but the main login scenario just isn't solved with one.
This 90 days password change BS, is the worst security risk there is. Do you know how many people have Summer2024 as their work computer password because of this system? too damn many! Not to mention the problem it creates for older folks who have a hard time with the change and most times end up locking them selves out. It creates far more chaos than anything secure, which I have been explaining to my company and they still enforce it for their clients.
It's often due to the security department following outdated standards. Nowadays NIST recommends the following:
Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.
No joke, my father used to have to do this. I set him up with a solid pw via pw mgr and then we found out that it had to be changed every 60d. He was going to just generate a new one but I was concerned that he'd screw it up and need help resetting the pw every time, so I was like "...just had 1 to the end, and do the same in the mgr; next time 2, then 3...".
He got to like 8 before (it appears, he stopped complaining about it) they dropped the policy. I just know that every other employee (these are not tech positions whatsoever) just resorted to "password1" and IT realized how fucking stupid that is.
Oh and it retains your last like 5 passwords, so you can't do "password1" "password2" "password1". Brilliant.
Just add a number suffix and increment it each time. This doesn't exactly make your password any stronger but that's not what they're asking for with their stupid policy.
My company tracks the first and last character so you can't do that. Personally I change a single character in the middle of my password to work around this.
oh i didn't know that, are companies finally realizing that creating and trying to remember new passwords causes more trouble then keeping one really good password?
My company's HR system (like, time off, time clock, etc.) asks for a new password every 3 months, but it doesn't give any fucks at all if you just reuse the current password apparently. I've been "changing" it to the same thing for like a year now.
Which is often a lot more secure than requiring you to create a new password. Requiring a new password frequently leads to people making memorable passwords which are a lot less secure than a good password which is kept for years.
A few years back, my company suffered a big cyber attack where the attack vector was the credentials of a high level user who frequently changed their password to the year and month for next password change, i.e. "2018october". Apparently this was common enough that the attackers were able to brute force/guess it.
I'm convinced this isn't particularly secure because it just results in the following.
Mandatory password change, password can't be any of your last six, bla bla bla.
Boom rotating stock of my last six, you happy?
My company changed the policy to increase the time between password changes. To compensate, they increased the required password length.
Neither of these policy changes were communicated to the employees. The expiry time tells you when it arrives (don't tell me you change it before it expires, good for you if you do), but if your new password doesn't meet the policy requirements it doesn't tell you what they are. The support request response indicated the minimum length was three letters longer. The only good thing about this ordeal is that I get paid by the hour.
Gotta do mine twice a year, always needs to be new, have a number, and a special character. It was annoying because I'm a pass phrase kind of person, but found it's not too hard to just add the year and exclamation marks for each password change into my passphrase.
Nope, has to be new and unique every time. Their system keeps every password I've ever had, which if you think of it, is a really bad liability if they're hacked.
Why? Frequent password changes have been shown to result in weaker passwords. What's wrong with keeping a strong one indefinitely? I mean an actual strong one not one character more than what's currently bruteforceable.
Overtime people will slip up and leak their passwords. Maybe they accidentally log in with it in the username field (causing it to get logged), leave it on a forgotten postit note, share it with a spouse, used it for a 3rd party service, wore a pattern into their keyboard, etc. None of those are that big of a deal or all that common, but added up with enough time and people and the risk accumulates. A infrequent but regular password reset helps to mitigate that risk.
Regular password resets can also help to prevent password reuse. Suppose someone uses their work password for netflix, then work requires a password change. How likely are they to manually sync the netflix password back to match the one they use for work?
Of course there are much better ways to mitigate risk. E.g. multifactor authentication. But a major security principal is defense in depth, and I think reasonably infrequent (e.g. no more than once per year) password resets have a place in that.
This goes for physical keys as well. If it is your house and you are certain no one untrustworthy has your key, then fine. But for a larger org with multiple people and turnover. Sooner or later keys will get lost, misplaced, etc. Rekeying the locks (maybe every 5 years, maybe every 25 years) has merit.
Forever is vulnerable to phishing attacks, same reason why monthly is getting discouraged. Monthly is weaker because the average person does slight variation, which attackers LOVE.
Agreed. My last job, we were forced to change all service account passwords annually but our personal passwords every month or two.
My current job has more domains and systems so I have so many more passwords with varying complexity and age requirements. I just set a calendar event for every four weeks (one expires just under 5 weeks) and change them all to the same generated password that meets all the common requirements and I save it in my password manager.
So every four weeks, it's seriously this hour+ long ritual for virtually no enhanced security reason.
Have you considered scripting it? For a while I worked at a place that required changing passwords every 60 days and it couldn't have been one of your previous 24 passwords. When checking out the policy I noticed there was no minimum password age so a quick for loop later and Bob becomes your mother's brother. Quickly cycling through 24 random passwords and back to my secure one and no more just adding the month/year.
Of course I reported it to cyber and about a year later they added a minimum age, now I'm hoping to get them to address an issue in AD that sidesteps changing passwords (though that one may be around for a while).
IMO, password changes were always bs. I'm a tech, and I always disagreed with it.
Longer, better passwords were always the better option. But try to convince your average worker to memorize a 15+ character password and they'll tell you where to go.
Today, with MFA.... Good MFA, not the SMS bull crap... Password "leaks" or breaches, are effectively a thing of the past.
Oh, you have my password? You guessed it, or found out leaked on some list? Cool. Good luck guessing the seed for my MFA, in the time it takes me to go change my password, locking you out of my account.
MFA failures should be reported to users. Often they're not.
Short story: I once had a notice from Twitter about access to my account from a foreign location. Kudos to Twitter, since they recognised the odd behavior and stopped it (this is pre-musk Twitter BTW). I logged in, changed my password using my password manager (the previous password was too simple, from before I had a password manager), then added a FIDO MFA to my account. I tweeted out to whomever was trying to log in to my account, to thank them, as my Twitter account now had better login security than my bank. IDK why banks don't support MFA beyond sms, but that was the case at the time, and largely, that's still the case where I am.
From a security standpoint, I recommend you follow xkcd's example, generate a long passphrase for yourself, and use it to secure a password manager (and whatever recovery options they have, eg, email), and add MFA to that, and anything else that supports it.
It's a pain to do, but honestly, better than waiting to see if someone is going to be able to log in to your stuff when your password is inevitably leaked by someone.
We have three month password expiry policy on AD accounts, but the requirements aren't extreme. We'd do away with it, but then we have our own CEO writing their password down on a piece of paper and giving it to us to troubleshoot their laptop (we have admin accounts for a reason ffs), after being repeatedly told not to, forcing employees to rotate their passwords suddenly doesn't sound too crazy. People are just way too irresponsible sometimes. Plus, we need to have it for certifications, so there's that.
I would need to check (not in charge of it), but I do remember in the fat stack of guidelines we got there was the password policy of 90 days. However, the point still stands that some people have no digital hygiene and will write down and share their passwords in plain text for all to see even if we didn't enforce password expiry. Though in all honesty, there's no winning combination when so many don't truly give a shit about digital security. As long as they can flaunt a certificate.
The CEO at my last place used to forget his passwords at least once a week, would write them on Post-It notes on his desk (and lose them by day's end).
We had a dashboard that showed failed security and he was many, many times worse than the rest of the business combined. That man cost the business more in IT time than anyone.
This was a bank. Granted, a small lending-only bank but still, I would never get a mortgage or loan with these people.
They should have just put a Yubikey on his keys. He never lost those.
It's somehow always the guys in management/on top. On the first sign of inconvenience, they start complaining about all the security measures, because now it affects them personally, and they're not here to be managed! Security is for everyone else, but definitely not them. They're above it.
Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator. (source)
It’s difficult enough to remember one good password a year. And since users often have numerous passwords to remember already, they often resort to changing their passwords in predictable patterns, such as adding a single character to the end of their last password or replacing a letter with a symbol that looks like it (such as $ instead of S).
NIST seems to have it as a guideline for memorised secrets:
Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.
Yeah, but I'm more used to them saying "occasional overtime" when they mean "5-10 hours mandatory overtime, unless it's actually busy, because we refuse to hire enough people to fill all the open positions." Because there's nothing smarter than giving all your sales staff enormous bonuses while the grunts on the floor are over 6 months behind for lack of adequate staffing.
(Still remember: if they have a password length limit, they store the password in plain text! If they do that in the backend. They can do that in the frontend too, in the browser with javascript, which is safe.)
He should have said a short length limit, it's still recommended to have a length limit of some sort (I think 64 is the official recommendation) to prevent people from doing shit like pasting the entire Shrek script as a password (because you KNOW some people will lol)
Why would you say that? Services are able to require special characters, variable casing and numbers. Why would the reqirement of max length of the password cause the storage to succumb to plain text?