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49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

grahamcluley.com

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Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#191
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I access my manager from my phone and type them in. I would never install my LastPass on a public computer even if they let me.

Pardon my ignorance but if you're worried about the computer being compromised so that they could somehow access your LastPass, why would you even use it for any authenticated work in the first place?

Having the one thing you logged in to compromised is a lot better than having ALL your logins compromised.

Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#192
post #142
post #123

I used to have to deal with an enterprise system that required quarterly password changes. The interesting thing about this system was it would refuse to let you set a new password that wasn't sufficiently different from the previous several passwords... Which almost certainly means they were implementing this security measure by storing the passwords in plaintext on the server.

You could take the first N characters of the password and store that as a secure hash. That would catch people choosing password1, password2, etc (but wouldn't help much with 1password, 2password...)

Strip all the non-letter characters and hash that.

Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#193
post #184
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bruce Schneier's summarization [0] of NIST's revised recommendations: 1. Stop it with the annoying password complexity rules. They make passwords harder to remember. They increase errors because artificially complex passwords are harder to type in. And they don't help that much. It's better to allow people to use pass phrases. 2. Stop it with password expiration. That was an old idea for an old way we used computers.…

Unfortunately my company claims their credit card and electronic payment processing agreements require employee password to expire. If that’s actually true, then most companies hands are tied until those payment agencies update their requirements.

That‘s because these companies, and the regulation itself don‘t have security in mind. It‘s really only about compliance and liability avoidance.

There is no incentive for change. Look what happened with Equifax.

Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#194
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bruce Schneier's summarization [0] of NIST's revised recommendations: 1. Stop it with the annoying password complexity rules. They make passwords harder to remember. They increase errors because artificially complex passwords are harder to type in. And they don't help that much. It's better to allow people to use pass phrases. 2. Stop it with password expiration. That was an old idea for an old way we used computers.…

I agree with all of this except password managers. If you use a lot of different public computers or temporary work laptops they don’t always let you install LastPass, so I frequently ended up being unable to access my accounts.

Which is why at a previous employer, everyone just stuffed all of it in a spreadsheet, with expiry dates, and last logged in times.

Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should never, ever, ever type a password on a public computer.

So basically, you should never use public computers for anything beyond looking at YouTube anonymously?

And searching things that you can't search for at home or on your phone.

The kinds of things that people get put on watchlist for, like where to buy industrial quantities of hydrofluoric acid.

Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#196
We had a password change rule at a company I worked at because QuickBooks required it. Because QuickBooks required it upper-management decided that ALL other passwords were required to be changed as well (email and desktop passwords, for most employees).

Because time is money, and the employees' time was all chargeable at about $250/hour, the IT guy was tasked with the job of changing everyone's password himself right before the 90 days were up. He just kept everyone's passwords in a password manager, and the "Notes" field contained the password change pattern the user wanted to follow.

Being the IT guy's manager I was able to exclude myself from these crazy shenanigans, but no one else was so lucky. In fact, many people asked for their passwords to be synced by the IT guy for other services they use at work!

Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#198
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately my company claims their credit card and electronic payment processing agreements require employee password to expire. If that’s actually true, then most companies hands are tied until those payment agencies update their requirements.

This is true, PCI DSS still requires password expiry. The trick is figuring out the boundary of the systems that are subject to PCI.

> This is true, PCI DSS still requires password expiry.

We’ve been using a compensating control of “our password policy is exactly NIST SP 800-63B (2017) plus two more characters in Min length” for our PCI audits since the revision was published in 2017.

It’s been accepted three times so far.

Re: 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying NIST and Schneier are wrong about this?

Schneier says "don't make people change their passwords unless there's indication of compromise" I make the assumption that the longer a password exists, the more likely it's reused and compromised. I don't have insight into every password dump, but I know my users reuse passwords a lot. I think a long expiry is the best balance in my environment.

Wouldn't you rather be sure and run the passwords through JTR or HIBP?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21204297

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