Passwords Can Sit on Hard Disks for Years

CygnusXII writes ""As people spend more time on the web and hackers become more sophisticated, the dangers of storing personal information on computers are growing by the day, security experts say. There are some obvious safeguards, such as never allowing your computer to store your passwords. But even that is no guarantee of security." "

Comments

Well, we can always do like in MacGyver

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My favorite MacGyver episodes were the ones where he used fingerprinting dust to read the numbers on a keypad. Of course, anyone using the keypad for a password is only going to press the keys involved in the password.

The most dangerous thing to security is people. Why go routing around on a hard drive when you can just ask someone what the password is, and they'll probably tell you anyways?

Re:Hehe

[Reziac]

That was my thought too...

Back in the Win3.1x era, when the typical swapfile was still small enough to peruse with a hex editor, I cruised through my permanent swapfile with LIST, just to see what was being dumped out of RAM. I found data in there that was identifiably over 3 years old. And therein, I also found some passwords archived -- as plaintext.

Not to mention logfiles; I have some that stretch back several years, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

So I don't find this exactly "news" either. Then again, I could turn this into a rant on the "expertise" of the typical tech journalist... (one of my PC maintenance clients is one. Regular exposure has given me a complete lack of respect for the breed.)