SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The latest NIST (United States National Institute for Standards and Technology) guidelines on password policies recommend a minimum of 8 characters. Perhaps more interesting is what they recommend against. They recommend against allowing password hints, requiring the password to contain certain characters (like numeric digits or upper-case characters), using knowledge-based authentication (e.g., what is your mother's maiden name?), using SMS (Short Message Service) for two-factor authentication, or expiring passwords after some amount of time. They also provide recommendations on how password data should be stored.
[Ed. Note: Contrary to common practice, I would advocate reading the entire linked article so we can have an informed discussion on the many recommendations in the proposal. What has been your experience with password policies? Do the recommendations rectify problems you have seen? Is it reasonable to expect average users to follow the recommendations? What have they left out?]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @02:55AM
honestly most of them probably have remote exploits calling their password entry/authentication mechanism's security into question anyways. And if you can steal it from there, it doesn't matter *HOW* secure your password is.
Which is why I don't bother with secure passwords for many online sites.
Why waste time creating and entering strong passwords when it's far more likely that such sites regularly get pwned. Just look at history. Car analogy: it's like paying to install stronger door locks on a soft top convertible when there's been a history of thieves not bothering with the doors to steal convertibles.
Don't use stupidly weak passwords which are guessable and don't use the same passwords for sites that count and that's enough. Which attacker is going to brute force your weak but hard to guess password over the network? It'll look like a DoS/DDoS attack! If they are brute forcing it locally then the password doesn't really matter already.
And even then, so what if your password on some forum is password12345? Someone can pretend to be you? It might make you even safer since you could plausibly say someone hacked your account and posted illegal stuff :). Whereas if your account is supposedly so secure with two factor auth etc and all that and one day it's used to posting child porn (due to some unknown flaw), they might not believe you when you say it wasn't you (even if it really wasn't you!).
There's also getting access via the "helpful" Support Team. Often you can take over someone's account by just calling support: http://imgur.com/WszA4Cw [imgur.com]
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjYhmX_OUQQ&feature=youtu.be&t=2m13s [youtube.com]
http://fusion.net/story/281543/real-future-episode-8-hack-attack/ [fusion.net]