Monday, December 01, 2008

Starting today we were required to update one of our passwords to a 12 character monstrosity that includes at least one of each of the following:

1. Capital letter
2. Number
3. Symbol (ie, @#$&!)

And the reuse of previously used passwords is restricted to waiting until the 21st round of passwords. Oh, and we’ll now be required to change our passwords in 60 days instead of 90 days.

I have passwords for more than a dozen systems and some of those systems have two levels of passwords. What makes them think that they’re actually increasing security by making it so much harder to remember all of the passwords? Because at some point a cheat sheet is required just to avoid calling the help desk several times daily to get your passwords unlocked because you entered them incorrectly too many times.