passwords

Pilot fish and his help desk colleagues do a lot of password resets and have learned that it’s best to sympathize with the callers and normalize forgetting those strings of letters, numbers and symbols. It can happen to anybody is the message.

But some forgetfulness is more normal than others, finds fish, who told one user, “I’m going to reset your password to your last name, with the first letter capitalized.”

Reports fish: “He said, ‘Wait a minute. Let me get a pencil and paper to write that down.

“I then spelled his last name for him and reminded him to capitalize the first letter. He thanked me and hung up the phone.

“Surreal doesn’t even begin to describe how this felt!”

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This pilot fish builds a lot of Linux systems that have to be compliant with U.S. Department of Defense/Defense Information Systems Agency STIG security requirements, but he tries to lessen the pain by assigning root passwords that are secure but easily remembered. Naturally, he sends them to the owner via encrypted email.

When the Nvidia driver in one of those machines gets corrupted after the system goes down hard in a power outage, fish needs root access to reinstall the driver. Unfortunately, the user of that machine (who, just incidentally, had ignored the warnings about that planned power outage) has no recollection of the root password, and he can’t get it from his email. Why? He has uninstalled all his old encryption certs, so older encrypted emails can no longer be decrypted.

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Longtime user at a big bank can’t access the archiving system, the intranet kicks her back to the login screen, and the attendance system that pilot fish supports never heard of her. She’s frantic to be recognized by the system, and she starts flooding the IT department with calls — not just the help desk, but operations and individual IT employees as well.

Everyone who gets a call is solicitous and sympathetic, and they all run down the list of questions that could rule out scenarios. Did she get a new PC? No. Did she change offices? No. Is anyone else affected? No. So what is going on?

The answer is simple after all. The woman had just gotten married, and upon her return from her honeymoon, she started using her new last name with every application — without first requesting to have her name changed in any applications. What isn’t so simple is understanding why she never thought to try logging in with her maiden name.

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