Password recovery hints

Probably should have picked something more helpful than "You stupid bastard." 
 

Hi,
 
At work, the program that they added for this, invented "answers" to the private questions, which of course meant you were wrong when they asked you the question the first time and we had to call in IT to fix that ... and force an allow us in to change the information ...
 
Really smart coding, in my book!

ston
Have you tried:

y0|_|57|_|p1d84574rD

?

now every juan has my login info to monkeysRus.com

When in doubt I paste this one in first


I wish I was smart enough to come up with a better  password ...
come to think of it I wish I was smart enough to understand what it meant ...
 
Kenny

bitflipper
I once had a customer site that, as a military contractor, had to be ultra-secure. Passwords had to be changed weekly, and were computer-generated random strings of text.
 
Sounds secure, but when I went into their offices early one morning on a service call I noticed that at every single desk there was a post-it note stuck to the side of the display with that user's password.

I once worked in a place with a similar password policy. Not military, but an environment where internal fraud prevention was a big thing and it was regarded as most important that no-one could log on to someone else's account. Passwords being changed by the server every 28 days to things like "djduk4859JDHSI----&98jdj", with dire warnings never, ever to reveal the passwords to others or write them down.

As you say, almost every monitor had a post-it note stuck to it. And if you called the IT help people part of the security check was to tell them both your user name and password, the two things they needed to log in as you...

The other extreme was when I was working for a British local authority. One day an IT dept. memo to all 10,000ish employees said "Passwords are meant to be difficult to guess. So we are a bit concerned that one third of you have chosen the nickname of the local football team as your password....."

I used to work at a place that set passwords. They would cook up good pws, but then email them in the same message with the user name to the users. They thought I was weird because I refused to do that. I would email the user name and then phone with the pw, or visit personally, or some combination like that.
 
They had it set so that if you failed three times with your login, it would lock you out. I wanted it to be ten times because a LOT of folks miss it three times, but a pw cracking program would try 1,000 times in a couple seconds. They didn't understand my logic.
 
I think that now-a-days, the best pw would be two or three characters long. Nobody would expect or try that. 
 

I have a few long passwords which are variations of a few character strings from my past - zip codes of childhood addresses (or "postcodes" as they're known in the UK), my National Insurance number from Britain, license plate of our childhood car (which I'll never forget), and a couple of other similar things. Usually if I get a password wrong then trying a couple of my variations gets it eventually. This time, however, it didn't work.

http://download.cnet.com/s/ipassword/
 
I use iPassword on my phone. It helps a LOT.
 
J