On Jan 20, 2011, at 9:23 AM, m.roth@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 14:08 +0100, Giles Coochey wrote:
>>> On 20/01/2011 13:12, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 11:05 +0000, John Hodrien wrote:
>>>>> An account is a personal account that should not be shared.
> <snip>
>> While such standards are much-maligned I actually find them useful as a
>> tool for pushing for better security against crowds that don't like
>> password change requirements, etc... The standards speak a language
>> "suits" understand and to some degree believe in [or at least fear,
>> which works well enough].
>
> Yeah, well, the problem is they're pushing more frequent password changes,
> while, according the the other admin I work with, NIST only recommends
> every two *years*. ESPECIALLY if you do *not* have single sign-on
> everywhere, frequent password changes, and required a lot of difference
> between the current password and the new one, *and* not coming anywhere
> near the last year or two's worth of passwords is worse than useless, it's
> counterproductive, since it makes social engineering much easier, since
> *everyone* will be writing down their passwords.
>>
>>> I can't speak for HIPPA, SOX etc... but automatic locking is part of IT
>>> best practice.
>
> HIPPA, and PII (Personal Information Identifier), and PHI (Personal Health
> Information) is very, *very* much need-to-know *only*, and violation is
> punishable by termination, and possibly criminal action.
>
> mark, who works for a US federal contractor with the US gov't, and
> had to get a "position of trust"* clearance for the job....
>
> * Which I assume entitles me to see bottom secrets, or maybe bargain
> basement secrets.... <g>
The whole 90 day password change recommendation came about because it was calculated to be the median number of days it would take to perform a brute password crack on a offline copy of the password hashes given a sufficiently complex password standard and a high-end desktop computer.
With Amazon's cloud services now I guess they'll have to cut it down to 7 days, or require finger print or retinal eye scans...
-Ross
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