Rod at work (7/18/2013)

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This topic brings to me an incident I saw at a state agency I used to work at, so please indulge me as a relate this war story. This is some years ago, but still the whole issue of passwords and maintaining secure passwords has been around for quite some time. While I was there, the state capital IT sent out a message to all state agencies warning everyone that no one should write their password on a sticky note and put it on the monitor or anywhere else near the computer. Failure to comply with this would result in severe discipline, up to and including termination. At this particular state agency where I worked, there were certain areas (labs and such) where many people shared a common PC. The edict from the state IT was something everyone took seriously, but I also witnessed how ingenious people can be, in finding ways to comply to the letter of the law, but still break the spirit of the law. This was back when Windows had a screensaver option to allow you to write a text message, as the screen saver. So what they did was write the text, "The password is " followed by what the password was.

I had to laugh.