Passwords: Protect yourself!

[draggar]

I work in IT for a large wireless communications company here in the US (one of be "big 4"). My area is fairly large. I have over 200 clients in this office that I support, 50 in another office, 3 POP stations (main telecommunications hubs - handle traffic coming in and out of a marjor area, like Ft Lauderdale, Miami, or West Palm Beach) and god knows how many switch sites (handles communications between the POP station and towers).

I've always been a big advocate for people using SECURE passwords, even instructing my clients on what is secure and what isn't. I rate passwords on a scale of 1-5 1 beging unsercure at all.

Unfortunately, we have encryption on all of our drives now so only the person who made it has access to it, so whenever I work on a PC I'll need their login and password. You wouldn't believe how unsecure a lot of them are.

Whenever your password is set up or rest it goes to a generic password, we'll call it Password01 (at least 8 characters, at least one capital letter and one non-letter character). Here is the rundown of the passwords I see:

Well over HALF are the generic, just wiht the number changed (Password02, Password21, etc..).

Most of the rest are only semi-secure. From what I know about them I could guess the word part of it in 2-5 guesses easily (and this is from what I know about them). Something like Theirname1, Petsname2 etc..

Out of hundreds of passwords I've seen I've only seen three that I would consider very secure and ONE that I would consider truly secure.

The very secure ones are still the standard, capital letter, number etc. but the capital letter is in a different place (petSname1, Petsn4me etc..) These I'd rate as a 3.

The only truly secure password I've seen I'd rate as a 4, the client had multile non-alphanumeric characters in it.

(A level 5 would require non-stanard ASCII characters for us, like ñ, æ, and ¿) which many systems here do not allow.

Luckily, 3 failed login attempts and your account is locked and you need corporate security to verify and unlock it for you.

[Warrior]

I ran a membership web site, where passwords were easily hacked, draining my bandwidth, I decided to assign passwords with alpha and numeric characters to all members, where the password could NOT be changed.

Problem solved.

[draggar]

Not that easy in a corporation with over 50,000 employees..

[Poker]

always wondered if a very secure password should be used for many different accounts, seems the answer would be no but memorizing 1 very good password is possible.