Changing Customers Password Without Consent

risinganger writes "BBC News is reporting that a customer had his password changed without his knowledge. After some less than satisfactory service the customer in question changed his password to 'Llyods is pants.' At some point after that, a member of staff changed the password to 'no it's not.' Requests to change it back to 'Llyods is pants,' 'Barclays is better,' or 'censorship' were met with refusal. Personally I found the original change funny, like the customer did. After all, god forbid a sense of humour rears its ugly head in business. What isn't acceptable is the refusal to change it per the customer's requests after that."

Comments

Re:Clarifying for Americans

[QuantumG]

It's all due to this crazy thing that the English do with their language.. they often shorten words to the right. My personal favourite is that "divided by" and "multiplied by" can both be shortened to "by". So when reading the equation a = b * c / 4, they may very well pronounce it as "a equals b by c by 4". That's not confusing!

People Are Password-Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

People who you would otherwise believe to be intelligent tend to trip over their own feet when it comes to passwords:

• Last year, a fairly intelligent college student who worked for me managed to lock himself out of an account by failing to notice that caps lock was engaged. I told him we could unlock it by calling the help desk together and providing the correct password over the phone. He very sheepishly confided that his password was [ourcompanyname]sucks. I advised him to pick a more-appropriate password and smoothed things over with the help desk, but watched him more closely after that. A month later I caught him stealing from the company.
• A few months later I discovered that [username][a-racial-slur] came up in the autocomplete list for the username field on a computer used by a manager who works for me. He apparently didn't press the tab key hard enough after entering his username. The manager admitted to using [a-racial-slur] as his password, and we had a long talk about maintaining a harassment-free workplace.

Both people were, on the surface, intelligent, productive employees. But both of them thought of their passwords as their private information that would never be learned by anyone else.

Here's a fun game to play: try logging into your employees accounts with the password [companyname]sucks, and get an early look at who you're going to be letting go in the next 30-90 days.