Nick and Margaret: The Trouble with Our Trains is a BBC Two show featuring Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford, who explore "the sorry state of the British rail network."
The dynamic duo's travels took them to the Wessex Integrated Control Centre, located above the platform entrances at London Waterloo railway station, manned 24 hours a day by teams of controllers from both South West Trains and Network Rail.
[The] documentary revealed more than it planned this week, exposing the passwords used at a rail control centre.
The article features a frame of the video which shows the complex login credentials taped to an LCD panel of a Windows XP terminal.
One might wonder if overstrict password policy brought this about, except obviously a strict password policy would not allow the password that is stickied to the monitor..
(Score: 1) by tenex on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:20AM
I really want to believe that 'Password3' suggests that the third password in a generated monthly/weekly/(daily?) password list is to be used at this station.
Seriously, no one uses 'Password[n]' as a password.
==> dave
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:41AM
I do, at work, because the password policies are silly and annoying.
Actually mine is currently: Password2
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @03:50AM
lol, yes. See, when YOU type Password2, it shows to us as *******
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:54AM
It could be the third workstation. First row, far left is password1, next to it has password2, next to that is password3, etc. The publicly accessible computers at my municipal library are set up like that. Thankfully, they are somewhat protected from idiots as when your time expires or runs out, they "reboot" automatically. As an aside, one of my favorite moments was when someone questioned whether they booted "too fast" and that they wasted "his" money; of course, they just restored from a snapshot, but try explaining that one to someone like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @08:51AM
I'm sure when he complained that the computers reboot "to fast", he didn't mean the actual boot time, but the time between restarts.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @01:29AM
I don't think it really matters that the password is dumb. Did you see the username?
In any case, I don't think we should come down hard on these people. From their point of view, if you're allowed to see that monitor, you're allowed to log in (and, since these are trains, it's probably important to log in reasonably fast in some instances, and people might move around a lot in those buildings, I don't know), so they did nothing wrong.
The fault lies with the idiot who let the cameras film, and did not go through the result frame by frame before giving their ok for the result to be made public.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday May 05 2015, @09:00AM
The fault lies with the idiot who let the cameras film, and did not go through the result frame by frame before giving their ok
The media don't let you go through the result frame by frame, same as they don't let you erase anything you said to them. Once it is in the can it is all grist to their mill.
The fault lies withthe idiot who did not go through the office first to remove anything like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @07:45AM
It's probably a case of "can not reuse the last 3 passwords".