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Fun With Passwords?

Posted by Cliff on from the fun-for-the-whole-BOFH-family dept.

eSims asks: "Most all SysAdmins have the pleasure of picking passwords and while we know the rules for picking good passwords we also know how to have a little fun with them as well. Password choices may be inside jokes about management, comments on the company, or just torture for the users we assign them to, but often they are funny. Without giving away the company secrets what are some of your funny stories about password selection?"

5 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Generation tool by Plake · · Score: 3, Informative

    We use a generation tool to create our passwords from "/usr/dict/words". It breaks passwords down to 3 word chunks (from 3 to 4 characters) with random characters between them. This makes passwords from 11 - 14 characters which is more then safe for user accounts.

    When they want to change we have another tool that works based on some of those rules so users can just reset their password to password.

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  2. l33t speak by Alizarin+Erythrosin · · Score: 2, Informative

    If I need a general password for a service to share with others, I typically take a word and l33t-ize it in a simple manner so it's not a dictionary word.

    For example: wh4t3v3r or w1r3l3ss

    --
    There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
  3. Re:My own worst enemy by brunson · · Score: 2, Informative

    Reboot into single user mode and use the passwd command to change your password. Or use an exploit to hack root and edit the passwd file. Or put the disk into another machine that you have root on, mount it and edit the passwd file.

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    09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
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  4. Re:Experiment in Password Abuse by cicadia · · Score: 2, Informative
    This won't work, since passwords are usually stored in an encrypted form.

    Usually? Which passwords? For what application? In-house or commercial software?

    There's not much that you can say is usually true about passwords. They've been implemented thousands of times, by thousands of different developers, and I've seen plenty of systems where user passwords are stored, plaintext, in a database somewhere, or in a file readable (supposedly) by administrators.

    There are good ways to do passwords, and bad ways to do passwords, and there're plenty of examples of both out there; certainly enough that I don't have any trouble believing the parent poster's claims.

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    Living better through chemicals
  5. Re:Three letter password by mmynsted · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am sure that post was an attempt at humor. . . If not then I assure you "that guy" is/was full of it.