Thousands of employees in the US Department of the Interior are using accounts that are easily hacked (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Thousands of employees in the US Department of the Interior are using accounts that are easily hacked::The Interior Department is tasked with protecting the country's natural resources, like gas pipelines. Hundreds of its senior officers even used "password-1234" on their accounts.

all 11 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] totallynotfbi@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago

Greenblatt also noted that 99.99% of the 18,000 accounts that staff cracked met the Department's password complexity requirements — including "Password-1234."

If a password as rudimentary as "password-1234" satisfies the complexity requirements, I think that some blame should be shared by the IT team in charge of account security...

[-] Cqrd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 year ago

My wife works for the govt and says the password rules also require being changed every 90 days for her, which has been proven to cause weak passwords and/or people writing them down because they can’t remember their current one.

The govt uses pretty antiquated password security guidelines, this article is no surprise.

[-] Ilikepornaddict@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 1 year ago

This is the most likely cause. My work has this too, but it's every 30 days, and you can't use the same password as any of your last 21 passwords. Which means I need 21 unique passwords. So it's Password1, Pasword2, etc until Password 21, when I then loop back around. Great job security team!

[-] TornadoRex@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Which also means your company is storing your old passwords which is a big security issue

[-] Ilikepornaddict@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 year ago

My company's IT department is terrible. Nothing is done right. And they're a multi-billion dollar company.

[-] TheRealKuni@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not necessarily, it could mean they’re storing the old salted hashes.

I’m pretty sure this is a setting in Windows group policy, I assume Microsoft does it correctly.

[-] Blamemeta@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Password-1234 is over 8 characters, has an uppercase character, a lowercase character, a number, and a special character.

Looks fine to me.

[-] n3cr0@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

They did it all correct: Characters lower case and upper case, numbers and symbols. 🥴

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

That's amazing! That's the same password I have on my luggage!

this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023

66 points (97.1% liked)

Technology

59312 readers

4522 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS