On Jan 20, 2011, at 9:23 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 14:08 +0100, Giles Coochey wrote:
On 20/01/2011 13:12, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 11:05 +0000, John Hodrien wrote:
An account is a personal account that should not be shared.
<snip> > While such standards are much-maligned I actually find them useful as a > tool for pushing for better security against crowds that don't like > password change requirements, etc... The standards speak a language > "suits" understand and to some degree believe in [or at least fear, > which works well enough].
Yeah, well, the problem is they're pushing more frequent password changes, while, according the the other admin I work with, NIST only recommends every two *years*. ESPECIALLY if you do *not* have single sign-on everywhere, frequent password changes, and required a lot of difference between the current password and the new one, *and* not coming anywhere near the last year or two's worth of passwords is worse than useless, it's counterproductive, since it makes social engineering much easier, since *everyone* will be writing down their passwords.
I can't speak for HIPPA, SOX etc... but automatic locking is part of IT best practice.
HIPPA, and PII (Personal Information Identifier), and PHI (Personal Health Information) is very, *very* much need-to-know *only*, and violation is punishable by termination, and possibly criminal action.
mark, who works for a US federal contractor with the US gov't, and had to get a "position of trust"* clearance for the job....
- Which I assume entitles me to see bottom secrets, or maybe bargain
basement secrets.... <g>
The whole 90 day password change recommendation came about because it was calculated to be the median number of days it would take to perform a brute password crack on a offline copy of the password hashes given a sufficiently complex password standard and a high-end desktop computer.
With Amazon's cloud services now I guess they'll have to cut it down to 7 days, or require finger print or retinal eye scans...
-Ross