[geeks] Mandatory password changes

Sridhar Ayengar ploopster at gmail.com
Mon Dec 11 07:54:11 CST 2006


Phil Stracchino wrote:
>>> I entirely agree.  Require every employee in the company to change their
>>> password every 30 days, and one or more of three things will happen
>>> depending on which of the first two you prevent:
>>>
>>> 1.  90% of the passwords in the system will be "cat", "dog", or the
>>> ever-popular "GOD".
>>>
>>> 2.  90% of your employees will switch back and forth between the same
>>> two passwords at 30-day intervals.
>>>
>>> 3.  90% of your employees will have their current password written on a
>>> Post-It note on their monitor or, at best, in their desk drawer.
>> 4. Employees will cycle through a set of random passwords and use the 
>> same password over and over again to get around restrictions on repeated 
>> passwords.
> 
> This is a superset of (2).  But, yeah.  And they'll probably be written
> down....

That's not what I meant.  I've come across a whole lot of people who 
will cycle through four passwords *immediately* so that don't have to 
switch passwords at all.  I didn't mean that they cycle over the change 
period.

Peace...  Sridhar



More information about the geeks mailing list