This practice is not recommended anymore, yet still found in many enterprises.
Monthly password change.
Enforced high complexity.
Sticky note on screen.
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.
Isnt this just bad practice?
Yes. It’s such a bad practice the fucking White House released an official memo (M-22-09) telling people to stop doing it as part of executive order EO-14028 (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
Microsoft recommends against it since 2019. But apparently, it is still a thing.
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It’s often due to the security department following outdated standards.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 …
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.
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.