Fucking hell.

And then they wonder that people resort to easily predictable patterns such as !1Qaz@2Wsx#3Edc and simply shift it one position to the right with every forced change and repeat at the end of the keyboard.

Tell them to move to yubikey or similar hardware key which is far more secure than any password policy will ever be and vastly more user friendly. Only downside is the intense shame if you manage to lose it.

The key should stick with the user thus not be stored with the computer when not in use. The key isn't harmless of course but it takes a very deliberate targeting and advance knowledge about what it goes to and how it can be used. It's also easy to remote revoke. If you're extra special paranoid you could of course store the key locked at a separate site if you want nuclear codes levels of security.

This insane torture is why there are post-it notes under the keyboards.

And they believe all employees actually remember so many wildly different and long passwords, and change them regularly to wildly different ones? All this leads to is a single password that barely makes it over the minimum requirements, and a suffix for the stage (like 1 for boot, 2 for bitlocker etc), and then another suffix for the month they changed it. All of that then on sticky notes on the screen.

Yubi keys... for all logins, would solve this mess, geez.

Modern day Kafka.

This sounds like my old place, but much worse.

We used to have laptops we had to lock in a cabinet (yeah, one of those cabinets with a really puny lock that's easy to pick). And we had to log into n old mainframe system that had numerous environment instances which each required a unique password that had to be changed every 90 days.

We (the software devs) basically rebelled on the laptop situation and insisted they find a better solution. Thankfully they changed policy and of allowed the laptops to be locked into our docking stations, which in turn were locked to our desks.

As for the mainframe system credential management, I tried using a standard third party password manager, but a) it wasn't a good fit for the credentials, and b) the sys admins or security team forcibly uninstalled it because it wasn't sanctioned software (even though it was a well-respected and actively maintained one). And our security group refused to go out and find one.

So being a dev, I wrote my own desktop password manager for the mainframe credentials. It was decently secure, but nowhere near as secure as a retail password manager. But it fit the quirks of the mainframe credentials requirements. And after my colleagues and manager did a code review of it, it was considered internal software, and thus fit for use.

As I was leaving they were in the process of removing all our local admin rights (without a clear path on how to accommodate for us developers debugging code - fun times ahead!).

But all of those annoyances pale in comparison to the shit you are having to deal with! Holy hell, that sounds like pure misery! I'm sorry.

Hahah, omg don't they realize people are writing that shit down?

I'm big on proper security for business, but holy cow that's nuts.

Guess I've been fortunate to work at some huge, well-known orgs that also really understood how to do these things.

One, in the 90's,had already developed an early form of SSO for the 20 backend systems that all had unique username and password requirements. Their call center agents really appreciated it.

I was going.to auggest a hardware key, but I fear they would add it as another layer rather than as a replacement for this nonsense

And I guarantee every one of those passwords are written on a piece of paper at the desk under the keyboard.

This is very close to my workplace but we have about 17 domains to work across, with a separate account for each. It's frustrating sometimes, but in the end I get paid the same either way.

My advice for this company: fire 2/3 of all IT staff (including managers). Then tell the remaining ones to cut off unneccessary things and do it better in the future.