Russian Spy Ring Needed Some Serious IT Help 191
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the close-your-spy-network dept.
from the close-your-spy-network dept.
coondoggie writes "The Russian ring charged this week with spying on the United States faced some of the common security problems that plague many companies — misconfigured wireless networks, users writing passwords on slips of paper, and laptop help desk issues that take months to resolve."
Writing passwords isn't necessarily bad (Score:4, Insightful)
http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-security-guru-Jot-down-your-passwords/2100-7355_3-5716590.html [cnet.com]
Of course, the rules are a bit different when you're a spy :)
Passwords (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing wrong with writing down your long complex passwords..... UNLESS YOU LEAVE IT LAYING AROUND
The complaint read like a spy novel.... A ready-made Bourne script!
Re:I find this entire story to be a load of shit (Score:4, Insightful)
But what if it is true? Likely, it is, actually. Every country spies on other countries. I don't really see the US getting completely bent out of shape over it, it was a 10 year investigation. What was more important was tracking them and finding out who in the US was helping them. But spies come and go, but spying is a constant.
they're not spies, they're defectors (Score:5, Insightful)
they put on the bare minimum effort to convince the kgb they're still on the team (so they don't get any polonium in their tea)
then they dig up their free bags of money in sullivan county, and get on with their average suburban wannabe lives. when the kgb calls, they find a paranoid schizophrenic's blog and rivet their kgb bosses with useless tales of intrigue from the wild west. this spy ring is a joke
if you want to talk about modern life destroying cherished traditions, add this to your list: comfortable suburban living killed james bond
Hey these were language, not IT, experts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Thats the least of their problems. (Score:3, Insightful)
nobody can remember a 26 character password
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. If preschoolers can learn an arbitrary sequence of meaningless symbols totaling 26, then I think it's possible.
Plus, your sentence is longer than 26 characters and so is this one.
Re:Thats the least of their problems. (Score:1, Insightful)
Writing the password probably isn't as smartest way to save it but lets be realistic, nobody can remember a 26 character password.
Use a memorable quote, a poem a song lyric, whatever phrase you can remember easily. Use the first letter or two from each word, swapping case and substituting punctuation marks/numbers as needed. Finally, a use for 1337-5p34k!
Example -
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
Becomes - wh wo ar th i th i kn ki ho i i th vi th
And further - whW04rTh1th1knhiHo11ThviTh
A 26 letter password that can be remembered easily, mixing case and numbers. Not perfect, but few passwords are.
go low tech (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Passwords (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is my point: if you do something that causes the FBI to monitor your every move and scour your home for clues for over 10 years, it is going to be very hard to keep many secrets, regardless of how you configure your WiFi or whether you try to memorize random 27 character passwords.
Re:If spies can't even get it right (Score:3, Insightful)
"I'm an IT director at a mid-sized company in the US [...] Our CEO [...] He'd ask me to fix a problem with his machine"
You *think* you are an IT director, but you are the mop guy.
At least that's what your CEO thinks, and that's all that counts.
Re:Thats the least of their problems. (Score:4, Insightful)
Use a memorable quote, a poem a song lyric, whatever phrase you can remember easily. Use the first letter or two from each word, swapping case and substituting punctuation marks/numbers as needed. Finally, a use for 1337-5p34k!
Example -
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
Becomes - wh wo ar th i th i kn ki ho i i th vi th
...and this is why I don't like this technique - you didn't even get it right in your example!
wh wo th ar i th i kn hi ho i i th vi th
Re:Thats the least of their problems. (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be fine, but then having to learn a new one every 12 weeks because of a password expiration cycle--that's when it gets impossible. You are always recalling fragments of the old password...