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Cr0s | 4 years ago

Do people even actually change their passwords when there is no need to do so, just because the password is old?

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Flozzin|4 years ago

I update my passwords from time to time. I don't trust the organizations will always say if there is breach, know there is a breach, or actually know how far and wide a breach went.

m12k|4 years ago

Do you trust them to salt and hash your password using bcrypt? (rather than store it in plain text). Do you use a password manager to generate strong passwords that are at least 16 chars long? If you can answer yes to both, then it doesn't actually matter if your hashed password was part of a breach or not, the hackers won't be able to brute force it. (Of course if hackers manage to steal the private key with which your session cookie is encrypted, they can still log in as you - but then changing your password won't help either).

Cr0s|4 years ago

This seems reasonable. How often do you change you passwords? Feels like it would get extremely tedious if you have more then a few accounts though, no?

daneel_w|4 years ago

For certain sensitive websites (e.g. domain registrar) I change passwords once a year or so, because there's really no guarantee that administration would 1) notice a breach early or at all, 2) fully understand the scope/severity, or 3) even notify their users about a breach.

woliveirajr|4 years ago

Yes. For sites, desktops, everything that have some rule stating that passwords expires after 30/90/180 days, must not repeat the last 3/5/10 passwords, must have at minimum/maximum n characters, must/must not contain special symbols or some subset of it.

dagw|4 years ago

3 of the last 4 places I've worked had as policy that you must change your password every 6 month.

tarellel|4 years ago

My current work forces updates every 3 months. It seems more like a security issue requiring this reset so often.

This is because they create another problem when anyone you talk to will say they have their password and just increment a number for every password change. That way they’re not having to remember a whole new password every few months. So there’s never much of a change in anyones password during these rotations.

- abcde1 - abcde2 - abcde3 - …

nend|4 years ago

This has been a standard IT policy for companies in the US for like 20 years. Probably 3/4 of the companies I've worked at over that time anyway.

ryangittins|4 years ago

NIST actually changed their recommendation relatively recently and no longer suggests periodic password changes without reason.

> Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

Source: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecretver

kasey_junk|4 years ago

I think the question is do people naturally change old passwords without such policies.

The policies are the problem and the industry has recognized it so they’ve moved away from those recommendations.