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The End of Password Expiration Policies, Seat-Back Camera’s on Airplanes, Unknown Data Breach
This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for May 6th 2019 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: Is this the end of password expiration policies, are there camera’s recording you on an airplane, and the unknown data breach exposing 80 million records.
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Hi everyone, welcome to the Shared Security Weekly Blaze where we update you on the top 3 cybersecurity and privacy topics from the week. These podcasts are published every Monday and are 15 minutes or less quickly giving you “news that you can use”.
Last week Microsoft has come out and admitted that password expiration policies are essentially useless and said that these requirements are “an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value”. In a blog post about updated security baseline settings for Windows 10 and Windows Server, Microsoft says that password expiration policies really don’t provide additional security. Microsoft says that “If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it. And if you have evidence that a password has been stolen, you would presumably act immediately rather than wait for expiration to fix the problem”. Now this doesn’t mean that password expiration’s are going away anytime soon but in regards to the Microsoft security baseline, it means that if an organization uses this baseline, password expiration will be optional and not enforced. The current recommendation in the industry is to use blacklists of banned passwords, implementation of multi-factor authentication, and detection of password guessing attempts.
I can say that for once I actually agree with Microsoft here. Password expiration is really an outdated practice so it’s good to see Microsoft getting with the times. Be sure to check out our upcoming monthly show where Scott and I delve deeper into this topic. In the meantime, let’s see how many organizations follow this sound advice from Microsoft.
In related news, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre released an analysis of the 100,000 most common passwords from recent data breaches and hacking campaigns. The most common passwords consist of ‘123456’ at 23.2 million, ‘123456789’ at 7.7 million, followed by ‘qwerty’, ‘password’, and ‘111111’ . My non-scientific analysis tells me that people are just lazy picking weak passwords like this! Let’s hope that more sites use password blacklists that help prevent users from selecting these really poor passwords.
If you fly United, Delta, or American Airlines, have you recently noticed that there is now a sticker over what looks to be a camera on the entertainment system that is found on the back of seats? If so, this is because of recent privacy complaints from passengers thinking that these cameras were recording them on the airplane. United told BuzzFeed News that the cameras were never activated and were installed by the manufacture for possible future applications such as video conferencing. As an additional measure all three airlines decided to put stickers on these cameras to alleviate any customer privacy concerns.
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