A Twitter Security Breach and Frustrating Password Policies

Do you work for a big corporation? Does the corporation frustrate you with password policies that seem unnecessarily complicated? You have to change you password bi-monthly. You have to use a combination of lower case, upper case, numbers, and punctuation. You can’t reuse the last 7 passwords. And so on. It frustrates you. It frustrates me.

But then I read of a Twitter employee having her Google Apps account breached, by someone who guessed her insecure password. Confidential Twitter info gets into the hands of online tabloid journalists, hungry for a story. And then I realise the wisdom of these frustrating password policies.

Part of the joy of leaving corporate consulting and running my own one-person software firm is that I am freed of onerous bureacratic tasks. Yet sometimes those onerous tasks are necessary.