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Fun With Passwords?
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?"
I have a friend who works at NASA (not like 'Houston, we have a problem!', but a local office in MD).
He was working on deploying some APs at the office, rather configuring them after they had already been set up.
He goes to configure one of them, and finds that the default password doesn't work (that's a good thing, of course). So he yells across the room to his supervisor: 'Hey Jim, what's the password to the AP?'
Jim yells back: 'cumshot'.
For some reason I really doubt that anyone else was aware of that, or he surely would've had to change it.
Hypothesis:
IT staff regularly reads user passwords (for fun, profit, bogus administration, lack of professionalism, total misunderstanding of why security requires the sanctity of private passwords).
Try this experiment:
1. Change your password(s) to something abusive toward the IT staff.
2. Observe the IT staff (watch for them to become irate, agitated, angry, or any other such synonyhm).
3. Change this password everywhere you've used it across the Internet
Step 3, of course, brings into question the diligence of the user.
As in:
your password is changed
your password is invalid
One of the duties of being a Sys-admin is giving out passwords/access for vendors. You need to poke fun at them for all the outages.
g0f1x[t
Also one vendor pissed me off, so I used a competing vendor as a password. example, "3yC!sc0"
But then, its funny you spend that much time coming up with entertaining passwords and the hardware only supports telnet.
I once read a tip about website passwords where you shouldn't have the same password for all sites that need a logic. One of the best suggestions I read was to have a password of say 4 characters, and intersperse the website name into it.
e.g. if your password is 1234 and you're logging into download.com it might be 1d2o3w4l or if it's slashdot.com then 1s2l3a4s or if it's msn.com then 1c2r3a4p etc. It's different for all and harder to guess, and cos it's not a word, anyone watching the keyboard might not pick up on you typing it.
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
I use alpha-numeric passwords religiously, and usually throw a couple non alpha numerics in the mix. On more than one occasion, I've forgotten them. Nothing will humble a guy like having to break into his own box, and succeeding.
I can personally attest that Simon Travaglia on separate occasions changed my password to:
- "fuckwit"
- "ican'tremembermypassword"
Great days, great days.
We set him up, and tell him his password is blank.
Two minutes later, he comes back awfully upset, demands that we reset his password, cause it wasn't blank. So we do.
2 minutes later, he's really getting pissed. Comes back with the head of IT. We ask him if the caps lock is on? He gets furious, asking how the hell it could matter if the caps was on with a blank password. We respond with, "there is a big difference between a capital B and a little b". He is seething, but slowly the realization creeps in, and he figures out what the hell we meant. Our boss, sits there like a statue, till the sales guy leaves, and then just explodes in laughter so hard he couldn't stand.
ahh, the days of the dot-coms, how I will miss thee...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I once knew a sysadmin who liked doing the ol' Abbott & Costello with passwords:
User: What's my password again?
Admin: "login"
User: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do, but I can't remember my password.
Admin: "login"
(etc)
User2: What's the username for the Reservation system?
Admin: "password?"
User2: No, I remember the password is "a$$h@t" but I don't remember that funny username.
Admin: "password?"
(etc)
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
At one point, my gf (a very petite woman) was using the password: #4#I!Better
A true statement, if ever there was one.
I work as a consultant within a Fortune 100 manufacturer.
During our projects we have to set up a simulation lab and run our project for a few months prior to installing at the factory.
For one project, the lab servers were administered by a person who either did not understand the purpose behind the lab, or simply did not care about our priorities. And, his delays were causing us to run behind schedule.
After some political wrangling, I assumed administrative responsibility of the machines in our test environment.
The months passed, we restored the schedule, and were packing up to head to the job site to install the system, and it was time for me to turnover the systems back to the original admin.
But, he flaked on the meeting, so I'm standing there with root on the lab systems some of which are trusted by outside networks. And, he did not bother to show for the meeting that he called.
So, I set the passwords, and put them in a sealed, unlabeled envelope, and handed them to one of the other admins with whom I had become friends.
The only instructions I gave him were: "You'll know what to do with this when the time comes."
A few weeks later, I got the phone call from my friend talking about the other admin, "He came in here shouting and cussing about how that damn consultant had locked him out of his own systems, then took off without turning over the passwords. I new then that it was time to use the envelope."
Written on the piece of paper in the envelope was one word in block letters: 1nc0mp3t3nt
[
The password I use on all the systems I access is ********
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
My important passwords I commit to memory, but ones that aren't so important I toss in a little program I found a few months ago called Whisper. Whisper stores usernames/passwords, will generate random passwords, and allows you to copy a password to clipboard quite easily. Anyway, the program lets you password protect your password file, so I did that. A few days go by and I open my password file and type in my password. "Wrong password. Failed to open document."
Yeah, that sucked.