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Russian Spy Ring Needed Some Serious IT Help
coondoggie writes "The Russian ring charged this week with spying on the United States faced some of the common security problems that plague many companies — misconfigured wireless networks, users writing passwords on slips of paper, and laptop help desk issues that take months to resolve."
http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-security-guru-Jot-down-your-passwords/2100-7355_3-5716590.html
Of course, the rules are a bit different when you're a spy :)
Nothing wrong with writing down your long complex passwords..... UNLESS YOU LEAVE IT LAYING AROUND
The complaint read like a spy novel.... A ready-made Bourne script!
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
But what if it is true? Likely, it is, actually. Every country spies on other countries. I don't really see the US getting completely bent out of shape over it, it was a 10 year investigation. What was more important was tracking them and finding out who in the US was helping them. But spies come and go, but spying is a constant.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
they put on the bare minimum effort to convince the kgb they're still on the team (so they don't get any polonium in their tea)
then they dig up their free bags of money in sullivan county, and get on with their average suburban wannabe lives. when the kgb calls, they find a paranoid schizophrenic's blog and rivet their kgb bosses with useless tales of intrigue from the wild west. this spy ring is a joke
if you want to talk about modern life destroying cherished traditions, add this to your list: comfortable suburban living killed james bond
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sounds similar to a lot of corporate America: Using OS that locks up, poor password security, need to send laptops to corporate for assistance, ...
Keep Doing Good.
nobody can remember a 26 character password
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. If preschoolers can learn an arbitrary sequence of meaningless symbols totaling 26, then I think it's possible.
Plus, your sentence is longer than 26 characters and so is this one.
Writing the password probably isn't as smartest way to save it but lets be realistic, nobody can remember a 26 character password.
Use a memorable quote, a poem a song lyric, whatever phrase you can remember easily. Use the first letter or two from each word, swapping case and substituting punctuation marks/numbers as needed. Finally, a use for 1337-5p34k!
Example -
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
Becomes - wh wo ar th i th i kn ki ho i i th vi th
And further - whW04rTh1th1knhiHo11ThviTh
A 26 letter password that can be remembered easily, mixing case and numbers. Not perfect, but few passwords are.
Why try to beat US security at their own game? go low tech. it works for el-qaeda. If they used the good old mail services they would have gone unnoticed for another 10 years.
"I'm an IT director at a mid-sized company in the US [...] Our CEO [...] He'd ask me to fix a problem with his machine"
You *think* you are an IT director, but you are the mop guy.
At least that's what your CEO thinks, and that's all that counts.
Use a memorable quote, a poem a song lyric, whatever phrase you can remember easily. Use the first letter or two from each word, swapping case and substituting punctuation marks/numbers as needed. Finally, a use for 1337-5p34k!
Example -
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
Becomes - wh wo ar th i th i kn ki ho i i th vi th
...and this is why I don't like this technique - you didn't even get it right in your example!
wh wo th ar i th i kn hi ho i i th vi th
That would be fine, but then having to learn a new one every 12 weeks because of a password expiration cycle--that's when it gets impossible. You are always recalling fragments of the old password...