A Geek's Life

Cafelog’s post Re: IMG-0416, particularly the bits where he tried meaningful numbers, triggered a memory for me and led me down the path of furious searching till I found it.

The article in question, The Secret Lives of Passwords, details Howard Lutnick’s (yes that Trump guy) attempts to rebuild Cantor Fitzgerald (CF) in the aftermath of losing 700-odd people (and their passwords) on 9/11. Between Microsoft Engineer’s algorithms and some good old social engineering, the battle to get CF back online was won in two days. The author Ian Urbina, went on to have a number of interesting exchanges about passwords with strangers .

An excerpt from the article:

Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

Numbers turn up everywhere in these keepsake passwords: an ex-girlfriend’s birthday, a reference to coming out, childhood addresses, 5k target times, and SAT scores to name a few.

On reflection, I too use/re-use a number of particularly emotive numbers in my passwords: my employee number from my first job, a variant of my birth year, and L’s birthday to name a few. It might be unintentional, but every time I log on to my work PC, I am reminded of the road that led me here, from that first job.