Okay, everyone loves making fun of people who choose extraordinarily stupid / weak passwords. But the answer is not to impose something like this, since, among other things, it promotes people writing their passwords down on a little slip of eminently stealable paper.
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The world's worst password requirements list
I tweeted about this but wanted to document it here for posterity. The Attorney General of Texas Child Support website has the wor
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The one that's really bad is the TechRepublic example, second bullet. Because almost all sites require use of special characters, I commonly use special characters in my passwords. When I run across an outlier like this which prohibits special characters, it leads me to break out the (eminently stealable) paper.
However, when combined together, the sum of the Texas Child Support requirements is just maddening. Perhaps someone will combine the Texas child support requirements with ING's randomization system ("OK, for the seventh iteration of your password, the characters in the second, eighth, and third positions cannot be identical").
Or they'll use a password manager like LastPass (or, far worse, the one in their browser), which doesn't use the same security requirements. Silliness.
The worst is when you have to change the damn password every time you log into the site. grrr
If the only security question is something in public records, lie. It’s easier than constructing a special password. You could also take that datum and run it backwords, and if they allow you U&LC, randomize the capitals, backwards or forwards.
I started using a special word or word/number combo for substitutes somewhere around 1992. At that time, our credit union still used one’s SSN for the account number, and couldn’t understand why I wanted to change it. I think we left before they changed that policy.