And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:

What the actual fuck? Person (or people!) who devised this password policy, you are an idiot (or idiots - all of you). You are stupid and insane and have no idea about security or user experience.

Day 1 10:00 am
Login to email account (Zimbra)
Your password is incorrect (I entered it correctly, this was a permanent issue ,used to happen in the company with many employees)
Reset your password by logging into internal company portal.

11:00 am
Logged into company portal, somehow. 2 Mbps internet shared among 104 people, you can imagine the speed.
Reset email password
* your password has been sent to your email id*
Are you fucking kidding me? U have emailed me the password to the same email I can't log in to?
Where did the architecture designer get this top notch weed from?

Day 2
Asked HR to reset my password (using a colleague's email)

Day 3
No reply from HR yet

Day 4
I went to meet HR, she's on vacation. So they have 1 person managing the password reset, for 5000 people with no backup person. Cool.

Day 5
Your internal company password has expired. Check your email for link to create new password. This is some next level shit going on.

Day 6
I called up Internal IT team to generate a new email for me.
They asked me to raise a ticket.
I can't raise a ticket because the only way to do so, is through the portal.

Day 7
Nothing. Btw, personal email and all social networks were banned. You can't even open stackoverflow.
And this was a research lab, amazing huh?

Day 8
Loss of pay for 4 days since I can't login to company portal to fill timesheet.

Day 9
HR comes back. Resets my password.
I try to generate my new password for portal.
The password policy:
Password can't be same as last 10 passwords
Passwords expire every week
8 characters minimum, 2 upper case, 2 lower case, NO SPECIAL SYMBOL. WTF. How long do u think its gonna take to crack that?

Fuckers had a company wise policy to automatically lock PC every 1 min if not used. Who the fuck can keep on using it continuously! I'm reading an article, and bam ! Locked. 2 wrong entries and that's it, repeat all steps again. Fuckers really didn't want to let me do my job, just keep on logging in all day.

Gets email from work

"New password policy introduced from next month

Passwords will have to include:
- a capital
- a lower case
- a number
- a symbol
- be at least 8 characters

Passwords will be be changed every 60 days with a new password not previously used"

Everyone starts moaning, there I am laughing as I'm in Linux and off their domain controller, and my windows laptop is a BYOD laptop and they don't want it on the domain :D

This is from my days of running a rather large (for its time) Minecraft server. A few of our best admins were given access to the server console. For extra security, we also had a second login stage in-game using a command (in case their accounts were compromised). We even had a fairly strict password strength policy.
But all of that was defeated by a slightly too stiff SHIFT key. See, in-game commands were typed in chat, prefixed with a slash -- SHIFT+7 on German-ish keyboards. And so, when logging in, one of our head admins didn't realize his SHIFT key didn't register and proudly broadcast to the server "[Admin] username: 7login hisPasswordHere".
This was immediately noticed by the owner of a 'rival' server who was trying to copy some cool thing that we had. He jumped onto the console that he found in an nmap scan a week prior (a scan that I detected and he denied), promoted himself to admin and proceeded to wreak havoc.
I got a call, 10-ish minutes later, that "everything was literally on fire". I immediately rolled everything back (half-hourly backups ftw) and killed the console just in case.
The best part was the Skype call with that admin that followed. I wasn't too angry, but I did want him to suffer a little, so I didn't immediately tell him that we had good backups. He thought he'd brought the downfall of our server. I'm pretty sure he cried.

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

I was called over by a colleague. She needed help because her computer kept telling her that she did not have permission to run certain programs or access certain files.

She logged in to Windows in front of me. The first thing that I noticed that the username was her office email address. I asked her about it.

Me: Why is your username your email address?
Her: It was this way when I got it.
Me: That is impossible. I made every Windows installation here and I always use the same username which is [companyname] as it is our policy.
Her: I'm telling you, this is the way it was when I got it.
Me: Are completely sure?
Her: Well.... someone else must have renamed it.
Me: So someone fired up your laptop, used your password to log in and changed the username to your email?
Her: I don't understand it either. Is it possible that it happened accidentally, on its own?
Me: ...

Then I explained to her that changing the username on Windows 10 may result in problems with file permissions.

I am not mad because she didn't know about this. I am mad because of her idiotic lies.

My argument: Password change policies (every 3, 6 moths, etc.) are a detriment to security because users will either come up with simple, throw-away passwords (knowing they will need to change them soon anyways) or use the same password anyways with a few variations.

Discuss.

So at work with the Macs we use, we have some guy come in after hours to service the Macs, and that means the security risk of leaving our passwords on our desks.

Not being a fan of this I tell my boss, he knows it's a risk and despite that he doesn't want this guy coming in while we're here.

Though my main problem is the Mac guy Steve is arrogant and thinks he's a know it all, and with the software I have on the Mac may end up deleting something important, I have git repo and all but I feel off just letting someone touch my computer without me being there.

I tell my boss about the software and stuff he just says contact Steve and tell him about it, to ignore the software and such, I say alright, I write up an email telling him not to touch the software listed and the folders of software documents (again it's all backed up).

No reply, I tell my boss and he says call him, I call him and he hangs up on me on the second ring!

Not sure if he's busy, but I left him a message, asking if he got my email, no reply and it's coming close to the end of the day (going to service Macs in the weekend)

I'm just not going to leave my info because if this guy can't check emails or even get back to someone why should I bother with this bullshit of risking my work.

From all the info I hear about him and my previous rants he's an arrogant prick who loves Macs.

Can't wait to leave this company, pretty sure leaving my password on my desk is a breach of our own security policy, and since 8-9 people are doing it, it's a major risk.

But he's friends with the CEO so apparently it's fuck our own security policy.

The company that I currently work for has a strict clean-desk policy. So strict, there's even have a little booklet that they have about 1000 copies of lying around the office everywhere. In the booklet is a playful description (with cartoons!) of what can go wrong when sensitive information is lying around, or shared with outsiders through careless talk, etcetera. Employees are encouraged to take a copy of the booklet home.

Also in the booklet is a description of the importance of having a good password. It mentions the required minimum (x) and maximum (x+1) length of passwords, mandatory character classes, and how often the passwords have to be changed.

Password policy for a big water company site in Spain.

Translation: Between 6 and 10 characters (only letters and numbers, no spaces)

In guess they have a VARCHAR(10) password field in their db?!?

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

Ladies and gentleman, I've done it.
Remove your hacker game trophies from your wall.
That nasty bug you fixed a couple of nights ago? Meh.
Your top devRant post? You'll delete it after reading this.
Every awesome accomplishment you can think of: it all means shit now.

>> I have SUCCESSFULLY changed my business Microsoft account password into something I can remember AND Microsoft accepted it in under an hour of trying!!!!! <<

I want to say a big FUCK YOU to MICROSOFT for WASTING MY BLOODY TIME.

FUCK YOU for giving me a max of 16 characters. DASB&(*(&G*HH*& for telling me every time my password is 100% strength and then after every submit tell me I have to change it AGAIN because it should be harder to guess. WUT?! It was 16 characters including a (capital) letter, number and multiple special characters, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! UNICODE EMOJI'S???!!! ALLOW ME TO USE MORE CHARACTERS SO I WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO GUESS IT, IT'S 2018 FFS.
I don't even understand why my new password is accepted compared to the other one, but fuck it I can access my account again.
Now I might have to find a new job before the company password policy kicks in again.

/me drops everything and walks out of the office to get wasted (not sure if celebrating or just really pissed off)

Why dafuq do websites have a max length password policy!!!

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

Please, make it easier to hack our systems...

Specifications called for user logins to be stored in a session and not be persistent. When the session ends, you need to login again. The system deals with insurance policy information and persistent login was deemed a security risk.

First ticket submitted by the client after go-live? "Please make the login page remember my user name and password, or that I've logged in previously."

Is there such a thing as a password policy that sets expirations based on the strength of a password? That should be a thing.

Per company policy, needed to change my password again.

Usually I just increment a counter and reset to 1 after 9 but seems now they keep the last 10 passwords used...

OK, time to add an extra symbol

If I have to change my domain password every 3 months for a bullshit out of date security policy (there's plenty of evidence suggesting that changing passwords is actually worse security), then maybe, just FUCKING maybe, make sure that that password change appropriately filters down to things like SQL Server so I can keep doing my goddamn work.

"Please unlock my account."
"You locked it by ignoring our password policy and having it not changed it within 24 hours."
"Please unlock it!"
"Please follow the instructions to unlock in the many E-Mails we sent you. You can unlock yourself."
"Please!"
"I filed a support ticket for you. Someone will get in touch with you and guide you through the process described in the mails. You still can decide to read the Mail and help yourself."
"Ey f@@"€& you! All I want is to have my account unlocked..."

Every day one of them. But I love you all. :)