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by dandare 2139 days ago
A company I know insists on rotating passwords fairly often. Everybody just increases the number at the end of their favourite password, i. e. intel1255
4 comments

I once worked at a place that required passwords to be changed every month and contain at least one upper and lower case letter, digit, and punctuation, and not match any previous password.

So the password for August, 2020 would be “August, 2020”.

This is super common, to the point where Microsoft used a similar password scheme as an example when talking about password spraying attacks at an RSA conference presentation

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-99-9-of-compromised-...

It's why I'm advocating within my organisation to get rid of password expiration and enforce 2FA for clients, but there's a lot of inertia to push against with some of them. At least uptake of 2FA is consistently increasing.

If you need backup, NIST standards agree with you.

Scheduled password expiration weakens security by encouraging users to make predictable passwords, and by entrenching password resets as a routine and unscrutinized process.

Many DoD websites are the same. It's so annoying. I use a password manager at home but at work I don't have that luxury (installable software is tightly controlled and very limited).
Where I work they use a password filter to stop you from doing that...

But it doesn't stop you from spelling out the numbers instead, plus that makes your PW longer

In my experience this is pretty standard across the industry.
I use the month and year instead