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My workplace has this common braindead policy where we have to change our passwords every 3 months. So every time I change it, Microsoft page asks me, “HOW WAS IT?”
Like it wasn't annoying enough.
I never understood the purpose of this.
Unless you are REAL stupid levels of lucky to have one of the mandatory password changes the day after a compromise that you werent aware of, all mandatory regular password changes do is make people use less secure passwords.
There's no purpose. It's 100% security theatre.
"Security theatre" is what I've named the contact in my work phone for the call center I have to call every time I accidentally use the "one time password" more than once (because god forbid they implement proper SSO, meaning I have to do a shotgun login run every morning). When I call them all I tell them is my name and that my account is locked.They click a button and we're back. Complete waste of time on everyone's part.
Nothing like TSA level security.
Technically it reduces the window for a successful brute force.
That said, it comes with serious drawbacks. Mainly making them impossible to memorize, so then users end up just writing them on post-its and putting them on their monitor. Or other equally dumb things.
Once upon a time it was a recommended best practice both by NIST and Microsoft if I recall. Both deprecated that practice years ago but most a lot of institutional inertia keeps it going, plus industry standards based on that time that don’t update as often perpetuate the problem.
So does mine, and we just got hacked. Almost like users make stupid passwords when required to change frequently.