'696969' and 24 more of the dumbest passwords of 2014

[LiberalElite]

Source: The Globe and Mail

Dear everyone: Your password game is weak.

SplashData's annual "worst passwords people are still somehow still using" list has come out. They have done this for several years now, and it’s appalling how foolishly bad the most common passwords still are. One of the new ones on this year’s list was 696969, which proves crude references do not make good passwords. Another terrible password is “trustno1” which proves irony isn’t dead.

Read more: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/696969-and-24-more-of-the-dumbest-passwords-of-2014/article22533463/

[Spitfire of ATJ]

1. Back in the days when "computer programers" were tear-assing through SoCal in 280zs....

The #1 password was "god".

Which gives you an idea of the mindset of these guys

[djean111]

2. Ah, makes me think of the days of old, when, as an HP/3000 system manager, I always

made sure that any machine I was responsible for had VEsoft's GOD program. VEsoft - the Volokh family, an interesting little group, indeed.
Using GOD, I could untangle and fix up anything that a user had FUBARed, even if they lied about, um, accidentally misrepresented what they did. Or tried to do.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

3. Most of these companies back then could backup all of their stuff on a small stack of floppies.

[djean111]

4. I worked for General Telephone. GTE Data Services.

Took a lot more than a small stack of floppies! :-O
Back then, being a system manager was actually a lot of fun.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

20. In 1980, I was hired by the late, lamented Bell Labs as a system administrator

The main machine I had to deal with was a DEC 11/70, at the time, a decent mini-computer. We decided to get a new hard drive for it, an RP06 with 178 megabytes on six platters. It cost $38,000, and was almost exactly the same size as my washing machine at home.

At about the same time, we upgraded the RAM from 500 kilobytes to 1.5 megabytes. It came on two boards which cost $3500. (We also discovered that Release 2.0 of PWB Unix would only address 1 megabyte of RAM. This, however, was easy to fix by changing a bit of the kernel.)

Now, we have 1 terabyte hard drives for a hundred bucks that I can fit into my jacket pocket, and 4 gigabyte SIMM chips for $50 that I can slip into my shirt pocket.

[blackcrow]

5. Spitfire, You clearly have never been in the same room with drum storage

and fearing for your life.

It astonishes me how little people today know about computer history unless they lived back then.

It was all a lot of fun back then, however.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

7. I've been in a room with this...

[Skittles]

8. me too

one time I hand-loaded 14 tapes for a sort, and then when I read the input tape into the next program it was f***ed up - I took it off the drive and sailed it across the room, over the disk drives and it smashed into a wall. The next day there was a note from my manager that said NEXT TIME YOU DESTROY A TAPE CLEAN IT UP. LOL, I remember I used to "scratch" tapes back then by taking off the labels.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. I still laugh at the way shows like "Lost In Space" used a tape drive to make killer robots....

But be honest.

Back then imagine someone telling you in the 21st Century almost EVERYONE would pay hundreds of dollars for phones made out of glass and they'd constantly be breaking them all the time.

[djean111]

14. Oh, what a great picture/memory.

One of the things I learned as the first female system manager for the minis - when down on the floor, pulling up the tiles with that tile-puller so I could pull cables, always remember to hold the top of my sweater or blouse closed.
And then there was the time I was admitted to the inner sanctum of the server racks - I innocently asked why they always grandly announced that they had to re-IPL and it might take a while - "Hey! All you did was power off and power on!"
And any time something went wrong on the IBM, the first thing to do was hit EOB.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

16. I remember someone doing a crow...

"AWK! AWK! AWK! AWK!"

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

19. I once saw someone hit the emergency stop button on a drum memory

And had an instant demonstration on how the law of conservation of angular momentum works. The drum ripped through the back of its cabinet, through the wall behind it, and onto the floor of the lavatory on the other side of the wall. Fortunately, no one was injured.

I wrote my first program in 1966 in a version of FORTRAN II to run on an IBM 1620 with 40 thousand bits in memory. I once wrote a program that would not fit into memory, and so took it to the other computer there, a Univac 1105, which was a vacuum tube machine. The 1105 had 8K 36-bit words of core memory, and two drum drives. When they replaced the 1105 in the spring semester, they literally couldn't give it away. It was replaced by an IBM 360/30 with 64 kilobytes of core memory and two 7.25 megabyte disk drives. People were saying, "Wow. No more memory capacity problems."

[hobbit709]

21. I've worked with these.

[djean111]

23. My very first programming job was taking wired boards and creating RPG programs from them and

running the programs on the brand spanking new IBM Model 20. Used another company's machine until we got ours, and when their air conditioning was not broken, the humidity made the box and a half compiler deck swell up and jam the card reader.
A bit darker side to the fun - as the first woman to ever be interviewed for a programming job at a large (largest) Illinois farm-based insurance company, I was asked questions like "How do we know we won't train you and then you will get pregnant? Are you using birth control? Is your husband okay with you working with a bunch of guys?" - stuff that would get lawsuits nowadays. But - back then, programming was fun, and kind of a cult. We were even allowed to drink our lunches, if we did not drink red wine. Because it stained teeth and scared other folks in the break room.

[blackcrow]

27. we don't want to train you, and then have you get married and quit.

That's what they said to me at SRI.

Now they say: You're too old to fit in.
And they automatically assume if you're an older person, you're clueless about technology.

[PosterChild]

12. Generally, the sys admin...

...password - the god in the machine.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. The joke of the time was: "What's the difference between a 280Z and a porcupine?"

"On a porcupine the pricks are on the outside."

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

22. The best sysadmin password I ever saw

Was "r00+Ru$" -- "rootRus". Simple, easy for the sysadmins to remember, and uncrackable except by a random character search.

In one of my stints as a programmer/systems administrator circa 1997, I had set up a large HP 9000 server (running Unix) on a Friday, but the application software would not be available until the following week. This company used a distributed password file (see yppasswd if you want to know more). So I downloaded the crack password cracking program, and ran it on the password file over the weekend.

Of the 600+ passwords, crack got over 400. Within an hour of my coming in on Monday morning, I was in a meeting with the CIO and others about setting up proper password security.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

30. You'll like this....

[Xithras]

28. And that's why PAM's are eliminating local and root passwords in the enterprise.

My employer switched to a Privileged Account Management system a couple of years ago, and nearly all of our enterprise clients either have one or are planning on installing one. You authenticate yourself to the PAM, and then the PAM gives you a single use password if you need to access a server. Ours is particularly beautiful in that it also ties into our network IDS, and will start autorotating passwords on all of our systems three times a second if it detects any sort of intrusion. Even the root passwords are controlled by the PAM.

The biggest flaw with computer security doesn't lie in the hardware or software, but in the operator. Take humans out of the equation and computer security improves exponentially.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

29. Oh sure, teach the computers the overused sci-fi plot that they don't need us anymore.

[Xithras]

31. We do keep a single emergency local account on each system.

Basically, you need a way in if the PAM goes down (it's never happened and the system is redundant as heck, but it could). Our current MINIMUM password requirement for the local backdoor password is a 70 character random case alphanumeric string. Some of our high security systems have local sudo passwords exceeding 200 characters. These are strictly for emergencies...you REALLY don't want to have to type those in. Especially as our policy dictates that the passwords have to be changed if they are ever used.

So, if our machine overlords ever decide to enslave us, we still have access to kill -9. At least, we will if the authentication computer running the vault stays loyal to us so we can get to the password sheets.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

32. It's times like this that I wonder about biometrics....

[LynneSin]

6. I don't think I could use 696969 as a password for any of my systems if I tried

They want Capital letters, small letters, no repeats and at least one symbol.

[BadgerKid]

10. The irony is security is best enhanced by increasing password length

not by increasing the list of potential characters.

[killbotfactory]

18. yep

[djean111]

24. Once had a trainee install a new release on an HP/3000. He was so proud - he even changed the

password, and had fun making us guess what it was. When we were on the verge of murdering him and stuffing him under the floor tiles, he said it was the Greek word for horse. Unfortunately for him, he spelled it EQUS. Last time he was allowed to work independently for quite a while.

[whatthehey]

25. he also got the language wrong apparently

Even with the other U it would be Latin not Greek.

Greek, or more exactly the standard Attic Greek studied in Classics courses, for horse is (transliterated) hippos, hence hippopotamus is river horse (should be hippopotamos technically but hey).

[Roland99]

9. 1 2 3 4 5

[Initech]

17. 12345? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!

[Paula Sims]

11. IBM ACF2 -- probably the most secure system out there

Then again, I still code in JCL

I Mainframes!!

[samsingh]

26. 696969 is my favorite password

[Spitfire of ATJ]

33. ...

[samsingh]

34. kick