Security → The Secret Life of Passwords

The Secret Life of Passwords

said by NY Times :

---

Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the world’s largest financial-services firms, still cries when he talks about it. Not long after the planes struck the twin towers, killing 658 of his co-workers and friends, including his brother, one of the first things on Lutnick’s mind was passwords.

---

One of the things people don't realize about their passwords, what happens after you're gone? Will your loved ones need them?

Even though my work passwords are simple, you're not going to get them without brute force as they contain all four character sets. Even back in the day they had nothing to do with anything in my life. One of my favorites was frogbarf. Mostly because frog don't vomit.
--
All opinions are my own and should not be attributed to any other person or organization.

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." - Robert A. Heinlein

Long article but pretty damn interesting. I use much of the same sorts of things in the pass words that later become my "random" hash. I had a 50 letter password that started out as the first letter of each word from a passage in a novel i read. Even though it ended up looking like total random nonsense before and after the hash system i use was applied i knew what it was.

THX & nice wake-up call for people did NOT back-up for the important "PA$$W0RD" ..... in my pocket, always thumb drive with different ASCII & Hexadecimal pass with clear message for what to use for ¿ ¿ This is my way.

It just reminds me of how many disaster recovery plans think that next door or across the street is far enough to be considered off site. I worked for a company that gave us a presentation on how they chose the location of their new data center and I was impressed by the things they considered to pick the site, area weather, earthquakes, transit, nuclear power plants and a few more. They wanted to be X distance away from the bad stuff, but close enough to the good stuff.
--
All opinions are my own and should not be attributed to any other person or organization.

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." - Robert A. Heinlein

For the truly important stuff--financial accounts, home records, insurance, and email--the passwords won't be necessary in the face of a death certificate and executorship. They will be reset and new passwords provided to the executor.

Work passwords for my current job would be... irrelevant. I don't have sole control of access to anything mission-critical and while my work laptop is bitlocker encrypted, the external drive I keep my active case files on is not.

For the unimportant stuff, such as if I wanted someone to be able to access my account here at DSLR for some reason, I have no idea. Such passwords would need to be kept somewhere safe and secure, yet accessible to family and/or friends when needed. I would also need to be able to (and remember to) update the list to account for changes, and that's the sticky part. I suppose a LastPass account would be good for that, since LastPass would certainly turn over the account on proof of death.

Right now I have nothing set up for this. Even when I do, however, the passwords for my encrypted containers... I'm taking those to the grave.
--
If only Opera had been open-source...

I keep a letter in our bank lock box with every password that my wife or kids will need if I die.

LMAO frogbarf!

I'd have trouble keeping a straight face using that one.