Had a fun day out of the office today. Went to a large IT support company for a large car company. I had to wait 30 minutes to use their computer as they had a security alert when one of their personnel accounts was logged onto even though the person was somewhere on the motorway network at the time….Anyway, as you can tell they are pretty security conscious. Everytime I needed to logon to our server, I had to get them to type the username and password in. This is at a telnet prompt (which is insecure to start with) on a localhost but using Microsoft’s SMS as the server is about 100 miles away. Anyway, the screen refresh is very slow and the guy types in his username, he *thinks* he has hit return and then he types his password in…unfortunately he did not type return and his password was displayed in full view of me and the rest of the office who also did not know the password – until then..It was very hard not to spill my coffee with laughter….
Reminds me of the time I did something similar when I thought I had pressed tab after logging onto a NT server. Instead I was still in the username prompt and I proceeded to type in my password whilst my manager was sitting next to me. The password was move2usa Needless to say he was not amused as it gave away my intentions of leaving – oops!
Lesson learned – never use the same password in the office that you use elsewhere and do not make it embaressing or personnal in case you display it by accident/the sysadmin guys crack your password/you are forced to hand it over to fix a computer problem.