Or it prompts people to just stick their "super secure password" with byzantine special character, numeral, and capital letter requirements to their monitor or under their keyboard, because they can't be arsed to remember what nonsensical piece of shit they had to come up with this month just to make the damn machine happy and allow them to do their jobs.

The DOD was like this. And it wasn't just that you had to change passwords every so often but the requirements for those passwords were egregious but at the same time changing 1 number or letter was enough to pass the password requirements.

I'm in IT security and I'm fighting this battle. I want to lessen the burden of passwords and arbitrary rotation is terrible.

I've ran into a number of issues at my company that would give me the approval to reduce the frequency of expired passwords

• the company gets asked this question by other customers "do you have a password policy for your staff?" (that somehow includes an expiration frequency).

• on-prem AD password complexity has some nice parts built in vs some terrible parts with no granularity. It's a single check box in gpo that does way too much stuff. I'm also not going to write a custom password policy because I don't have the skill set to do it correctly when we're talking about AD, that's nightmare inducing. (Looking at specops to help and already using Azure AD password protection in passive mode)

• I think management is worried that a phishing event happens on a person with a static password and then unfairly conflating that to my argument of "can we just do two things: increase password length by 2 and decrease expiration frequency by 30 days"

At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I've brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn't budge. It's just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported ... /Sigh

That's super true, so many times to stay ISO compliant (I'm thinking about the lottery industry here), security policies need to align with other recommendations and best practices that are often insane.

But then there's a difference between those things which at least we can rationalize WHY they exist... and then there's gluing USB plugs shut because they read about it on slashdot and had a big paranoia. Lol

What I really love is mandatory length and character password policies so complex that together with such password change requirements that push people beyond what is humanly possible to memorize, so it all ends down written in post-its, the IT equivalent of having a spare key under a vase or the rug.

For our org, we are required to do this for our cybersecurity insurance plan

And in my company the password change policies are very different from one system to another. Some force a change monthly, some every 28 days, some every 90 days, and thwn there is rhat one legacy system that no longer has a functioning password change mechanism, so we can't change passwords there if we wanted to.

And the different systems all want different password formats, have different re-use rules.

And, with all those uncoordinated passwords, they don't allow password managers to be used on corporate machines, despite the training materials that the company makes us re-do every year recommending password managers...

Forcing password expiration does cause people to make shittier passwords. But when their passwords are breached programitically or through social engineering They don't just sit around valid for years on the dark web waiting for someone to buy them up.

So glad we opted for a longer password length, with fewer arbitrary limits, and expiry only after 2 years or a suspected breach.