TABLE OF CONTENTS Password day is something that I celebrate maybe once or twice a year. It is such an important part of my password strategy that I thought it deserved its very own chapter.
Password day is an annual or semi-annual holiday where you still go to work, the banks and post office are open, and you don t get any presents, candy, or special recognition. What you do is spend a part of that day completely focusing on your passwords. Not just some of your passwords, all of your passwords in an attempt to make them all unique. Go through every account, service, subscription, membership, system, and device you have a password on, and change those passwords. Spend some time improving your password selection skills, and securely document your entire selection of passwords.
I started celebrating password day a few years ago after working on an investigation that tracked down who had broken into a financial services company. The company had very poor network security quite typical for that time and had been the target of a number of hacker attacks. They hired a security firm to audit their systems and found that their biggest weakness was user passwords. Many user accounts had passwords that exactly matched their usernames, predictable passwords such as password and administrator, and some accounts even had blank passwords. They implemented a stronger password policy and slowly began the process of changing passwords and updating system security.
Six months later they still found themselves...
