Comments
Follow Comments Sorted by time
guest_
· 5 years ago
· FIRST
Regularly changing passwords is one of the things that computer security experts, as well as the guy credited with inventing the modern password security scheme tend to despise. Creating convoluted passwords that are hard for a human to remember already has flaws. While it helps prevent the movie cliche and classic hacker trick of guessing- it doesn’t really make it any harder for a computer to guess- that can be done simply by making a password longer. But having a long, completely random and meaningless password that you change all the time makes passwords harder to remember, and then you have different long hard to remember random passwords for 20 different systems. So what do most people do? They just write it down on paper or in a file so they don’t forget- which is a bigger security risk to begin with. Passwords are encrypted and stored so they can’t be read plain text in code, but a file or paper generally aren’t, it makes it easy for a human or machine to get.
3
guest_
· 5 years ago
If you have a good password, long, special characters, only you know it, you can remember it and it isn’t too obvious like a loved ones name or your address, if it hasn’t been cracked before, use that. If someone ever cracks it, change it. But unless you know or suspect that your password has been compromised most people are better off sticking to 1 and keeping it private. The only places where changing passwords often might have any value is in high value defense situations that require multi level authentication and passwords aren’t memorized anyway, but some type of “hard” security is used with encryption and other measures to make access not solely password dependent: and in certain situations where a password is used with a cypher or challenge phrase such as in military operations.
3
jasonmon
· 5 years ago
And, for the interested geeks out there who haven't seen it yet, here's xkcd being hilarious/informative on the subject: https://xkcd.com/936/ which I read years ago and just dug up by googling "horse battery staple"
3
·
Edited 5 years ago
matthewg
· 5 years ago
@kakaburra But...but my underoos look better there!
1
kakaburra
· 5 years ago
Really? I’d love to see them there! *innocent face*
·
Edited 5 years ago
matthewg
· 5 years ago
*dresses up in my Sunday Best for desk decorating*
1
