A Photo Accidentally Revealed a Password For Hawaii's Emergency Agency (qz.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: In the aftermath of an erroneous missile warning that terrified Hawaiians on Saturday (Jan. 13), the state's emergency management agency has come under increased scrutiny, from the poor design of the software that enables alerts to a particularly slapdash security measure by one of its employees. Old photos from the Associated Press inside the agency's office appear to show an unspecified password on a yellow Post-It note, stuck to a computer monitor. The image, which shows operations manger Jeffrey Wong standing in front of the computer, was taken in July and appeared in articles published at the time about the agency's preparedness in the face of a nuclear threat. The agency verified that the password is indeed real but wouldn't go into specifics on what program the password was supposed to be used for.

Comments

The weakest security

[Archangel Michael]

The weakest security is always the human involved.

IMHO people posting, sharing or otherwise exposing passwords, should be written up, and eventually fired.

What is the point of a password that is out in the open like this? Are passwords that hard to remember?

I wanna run away screaming!

It would be funny if not so possibly tragic.

[Sqreater]

I learned in the Air Force in the seventies that security is impossible to expect from your average American. They just don't get it, no matter how hard you try to explain it to them. Americans are just not afraid of things they should be afraid of, and not suspicious of people and things they should be suspicious of. They don't feel endangered. And it is very hard to make them feel so.