On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Kai Wirt <u-turn1 (at) gmx (dot) de [email concealed]> wrote:
>> Just also revise enforcing password changing rules (every after 30 days) on your site and strong passwords(no less then 8 characters, special characters, upper cases,numbers and symbols) , this helps when attackers try brute forcing, so by the time they crack the password its no longer in use...
>
> There's an interesting paper on this topic:
>
> http://research.microsoft.com/users/cormac/papers/2009/SoLongAndNoThanks
.pdf
>
> In short, most of the password rules employed today are mostly annoying to users and
> don't really improve security.

That paper is deeply flawed, if not outright wrong, and borders on the
pernicious.

The end-user externality not considered by them is the cost to clean
up an incident in an organization by IT staff after someone picks the
dancing pigs over the secure way of doing things.

If more staff were fired or otherwise disciplined after it was proved
that they had gotten their company PC infected by navigating to
non-work-related web sites (or performing their work in an unsafe
manner against advice), we'd have a much better security environment -
and the discipline must also apply to C-level execs, as the data they
handle are even more precious than some staffer in shipping.

I've personally cleaned up malware from the CxO's machines at $WORK,
multiple times, because they a) won't pay attention to my
recommendations for handling web sites and email and b) won't let me
block or quarantine executables and suspect documents at the gateways
that are designed to handle them.

Kurt

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