North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Fun new policy at AOL

  • From: Jack Bates
  • Date: Fri Aug 29 17:33:30 2003

[email protected] wrote:

So the provider allows the user to pick an insecure password, and then
complains that they can't support a security measure because of their poor
policy choices/enforcement?
You have an easy way to change password enforcement of an existing user base? Dealing with people infected with the latest worms has increased workloads across the board. That's only a small percentage of the user base. Password enforcement on an existing user base will cause problems for a majority of the user base.

Proprietary dialers help, but have their own problems. If you use the mail interface to change the dialup passwords, you'll get calls from users that can no longer dial in; otherwise you fragment passwords on an account and add overhead that's unnecessary. Adding the policy and waiting for it to rotate out would take over a decade.

I wouldn't recommend a policy change like that for any user base over 10,000.

-Jack