Does Your Business Have a Password Problem?

The problem with passwords is that they're not very user-friendly...

One of two things generally happens with end-users. They either forget their passwords and lock themselves out of their systems...or which is much more dangerous… they do the sticky note. Walkthrough any office and it’s a sure bet that you will find sticky notes with a password on it pasted to a computer monitor. The more security conscience end-user usually puts them under the keyboard. They don’t want the cleaning company to have their passwords.

Mandatory corporate password changes every 90 days soon came into vogue. It was assumed that required password changes every 90 days would improve security. Epic fail. When people are forced to change their passwords they will not put a whole lot of mental muscle behind it. Instead, it was found that people tended to create passwords that followed predictable patterns, called ‘transformations,’ such as incrementing a number, changing a letter to a similar-looking symbol (changing an S to a $), adding or deleting a special character (going from three exclamation points at the end of a password to two), or switching the order of digits or special characters (moving the numbers to the beginning instead of the end). Hackers are not fooled by these transformations.

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