TABLE OF CONTENTS Passwords are secrets and your best passwords should be your best-kept secrets. Nevertheless, passwords age and old secrets are poor secrets. Eventually, your password will expire. The system that handles your password may or may not force you to change an expired password; however, as with all expired items, you should discard it.
Some people say time is money. Some say that time flies. Some have time on their hands and others have time to kill. However, time and passwords do not mix. Time is one aspect of password security that you cannot control; you cannot let your passwords get too old.
The primary reason you should regularly change passwords is because password cracking takes time and as time passes the risk of a password being cracked increases. There may be no one trying to crack your password, but you should take precautions based on the assumption that someone is. We do not expect to get in a car accident every time we drive, but we put our seatbelts on every time based on that assumption.
If a password were strong enough that it would take 60 days to crack, then after 60 days the chance of that password being compromised would increase. Every day that passes further increases the risk. Passwords are typed on keyboards, saved on disks, stored in memory, traverse networks, and are sometimes shared with others. All of these things potentially reduce the security of your password over time, and the...
