Ask Lemmy

A company I used to work for is big enough that everyone reading this has heard of it. They had this wonderful security nightmare going on:

When you were hired, the company would issue your user credential with a standard password that was "CompanyName1" and require you to immediately change it at first logon. Everyone knew this password because everyone got it when they were hired.

Password policy required everyone to reset their password every 60 days. Not the worst ever but still pretty aggressive. And with the rise of all the mobile devices connecting with your corp account it was getting to be a worse and worse experience.

Can you guess yet how these two policies are linked in my story?

Well, some of the C-Suite executives didn't have time for any of these security shenanigans. So they would have their executive support person log into an administrative console and reset the exec's password every 59 days to the same value that it currently had, thereby bypassing the password re-use filter.

That value they were continuously setting was... "CompanyName1"

I know of at least two executives that were doing this while I worked there.

Extremely limited password length. I think it was around 6 or 8 characters. Exactly! So every password was the same length.

No other requirements. The best part? It was a bank. But not a customer facing service.

Any service that says I must have a 12 or 14 string password, combined with symbols, numbers and letters.

Do you know why, I have to keep resetting my password, services that have this dumb requirement? Because your fucking requirements are absurd and unnecessary. I don't have the mental capacity to care to remember that long of a password. I have to have a document now of all of the passwords I have so it's not forgotten. I have to have browsers autofill for me because of this shit.

In a perfect world, 6 - 8 string passwords would suffice and lots of emphasis on symbols and numbers at the very least. The longer you try making the characters of a password, the chances of forgetting increases.

Flickr does this. Some of the portals to my apartment portal does this. Portals to some of my medical information does this. It's fucking bullshit. StateFarm does this too.

12 characters, upper/lower/special requirement, and no more than two occurrences of the same character together. That's FedEx.

Two other thoughts on the topic:

• Websites/apps/etc should always list their password requirements on the login page to make it easier to determine what password you used for the site in question.
• There are plenty of websites where I literally log in only by using the "forgot password" flow because their password requirements are so ridiculous.

"Password must contain letters numbers, and at least one of these special characters."

Turns out, half of those special characters weren't allowed 🫠

Facebook got caught having a flat text file being send around between employees to make accessing data easier. That text file contained tens of thousands of peoples username and password.

Why? Facebook being facebook I guess

It happens a bit too often that I make an account somewhere with a long, generated password and then when I log in it throws errors at me.

But a few times a website didn't just show me an error, I got the whole crash dump including their encryption approach and versioning

Most absurd was from a job I had in college. This was the password to log into an ancient dumb terminal (literally a monochrome black and green display) on a local-only network that only handled our time clock.

Requirements:

• 8 characters exactly
• You supply the first 4, the system generated the last 4
• I can't remember if it allowed numbers, but there were definitely no special characters and I think it was also case-insensitive

Required to change password every 30 days.

The most funny one was a professional and rather costly password checking tool.

Besides the usual other rules, it had a rule that the new pw must not be similar to the old one. For similarity, this thing checked each character in it's place.

So you could have the old one:
"MyAssMy$1" and the new one:
"$1MyAssMy" and it was not similar at all :)

[offtopic?]

Debbie's password is "PlutoGoofyMickeyMinnieDaffyBugsThorLosAngles"

She was told that the password needed seven characters and a capital.

Anything that requires regular password resets. It's fine if it's changed on the site and in the user's vault automatically, but if a user has to type in their password with any sort of regularity, it's a recipe for disaster to require regular changes.

People write predictable or formulaic passwords, or just end up resetting their password more often than necessary because they forgot it (making them more susceptible to phishing).

I've encountered a few sites that restricted repeating or sequential characters. Of course told after failing the first creation attempt. Makes things like randomly generated passphrases fun to figure out. Particularly when their idea of "sequential" involves both in alpha/numerical order, but also adjacent spacing on the (assumed?) qwerty keyboard!

I needed to get a certificate for digitally submitting my taxes. This, of course, requires me to set a password for it. The tax office' web site lists a number of requirements and rejects any password that does not match those (so it said). So far, so good, the usual stuff, lower and upper case, numbers, special characters, minimum lenght. No surprises there.

For one of the "special characters" I used "ö" (umlaut o), which is a normal character in my language (which is the same as the tax offices, so they should be aware of those). The web site filter happily accepted this password containing the "ö". But the back engine got a severe case of digital diarrhea from it. I had to clear my caches and cookies to completely re-starting the application process.

Another password SNAFU I had many years ago in a place using TN3270 terminals. To those who have never seen such a thing, it is a so-called "smart terminal". It does not send and receive single characters like a telnet or SSH session, but the host sends a mask to the terminal, defining fields that can be filled out, and with a "send" or "function" key (IIRC) you could send the data back. Those fields had fixed lengths, of course. You might guess the problem...

So the login screen had two fields of eight characters each: "Username" and "Password". I entered the credentials I have been given and sent them. The first thing I did was to select "change password". It opened a form with three fields: "old password", "new password", and "repeat new password". Nothing odd about that, but the fields had twelve characters. So, not knowing the particulars of that system (I was used to UNIX style terminals back then), I entered a new password that was longer than eight characters. Guess what? I logged out, I tried to log in, I was stuck. I had to ask my admin to reset my password. And had found the first of many, many bugs in that system.

Anyone remember the Password Game?

I personally hate character limits. I understand minimum character count, but I can't have more than 15 characters? Bruh

There is such a thing as good unhinged?

I'm going to need an example here...

The most basic rules commonly required everywhere. When you have such specific rules, it ironically actually makes finding the password through brute force easier because you can eliminate a bunch of variables that could have existed without all the rules. I can eliminate any permutation under 8 characters, doesn't contain a number, and doesn't contain a special character.

It will still possibly take a billion years to guess, but it could have been two billion without the rules.

Of course, I also find it wild that the metric for how good an encryption or password system is, is just how long it would take to guess every possible combination of input it could be, sequentially. It doesn't account for a brute force attempt that just selects random inputs. It could take until the heat death of the universe... It could take 3 seconds. It's up to chance at that point. Not to mention all the easier ways of getting a password. Like gaslighting the person who knows it into giving it up.