This practice is not recommended anymore, yet still found in many enterprises.
It’s even better when the company saves your old passwords, just so you can’t use them again.
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.
Same. Its so stupid. Doesn’t increase security and just annoys everyone.
Error: Your password’s Levenshtein distance indicates that your new password is more than 20% similar to a password previously used within the last 10 years.
Policy requires your password to:
- Be unique
- Have at least one uppercase letter
- Have at least one lowercase letter
- Contain 2 symbols other than apostrophe
- Have 4 numbers that are either separated by other characters, or represent an integer both greater than 3000 and not ending with the same last two digits as the previous or next 17 years from the current date.
- Include exactly one Cryllic character
- Exceed no more than 18 characters
/satire (I hope)
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.
Plus password managers exist so whatever.
Can’t you just have two passphrases and alternate between them ?
For me, no. Can’t be the same or too similar to the past 4-5 passwords and has to be 14 characters long.
Oh, as a french philosopher said:
“Never has so much spirit been put into making us stupid.” -Voltaire
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.
oh i didn’t know that, are companiesy finally realizing that creating and trying to remember new passwords causes more trouble then keeping one really good password?
Only on accounts that have MFA is password rotation no longer recommended.
If the account is non MFA protected password changes are still recommend.
really? what’s the standard for that? like how often should you be rotating your password?
I assumed many people forget their new passwords (because I often do) than are protected by continually rotating passwords.
I have over 500 passwords in my password manager. I don’t know what I’d do without it.
It’s one of the updated NIST recommendations, I don’t recall which one but it specifically calls out no password cycling for MFA protected accounts.
Password1
Password2
Password…
Password28
Password29
Edit: Call IT to reset password costing the company money because of their idiotic password policy
Password…
Password43
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.
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.
Which certifications? NIST standards don’t recommend regular rotations anymore.
Nist guidelines used to recommend rotation, and our security team would quickly point to it when people complained.
So of course we jumped on that and security team said “well nist are just guidelines and we go for more stringent requirements”…
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.
Glad we are Passwordless. Now none knows me password.
Isnt this just bad practice?
Yes. It’s such a bad practice the fucking White House released an official memo telling people to stop doing it as part of executive order M22-09 (federal zero trust strategy). It applies as a rule to all government and military entities and therefore has been carved out in exceptions for FedRAMP and other compliance frameworks. Stop forcing people to change their fucking passwords.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/M-22-09.pdf
Ye this
Microsoft recommends against it since 2019. But apparently, it is still a thing.
Monthly password change.
Enforced high complexity.
Sticky note on screen.Are you me
Hey now, it’s under the keyboard. Much more secure there.
ProjectnameMonthYear!!
Monthly? That is insane. Let me guess, no mfa.
Correct!
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.
!=bfVzh5k&nbsA|+|ZuFc=k25D5zUQ*34QDjK gang
Max. 16 characters
(Still remember: if they have a password length limit, they store the password in plain text!)
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?
Lemmy-UI has a password limit of 60 characters. Does that mean they are storing your password in plain text?
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)
I think they could also check that length with Javascript in the browser. Dont know, you should ask the devs.
No, that means they don’t like DoS attacks.
Does anyone like being on a receiving end of those?
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.
Mobile device. Read and type.
This guy: 😎
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.
Meanwhile… https://xkcd.com/936/
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html
That said, the company I work for violates all of the above rules …
I am 100% adapting this scheme for my work password! Thank you!
Summer2024 is their password? Jeez. What a idiot.
Mine is a proper set of lowercase and uppercase characters, numbers, and symbols, written in a post-it note and taped to my laptop.
Ah I just keep mine in my desk drawer next to the 2FA code fob