I was recently reminded of a work incident that occurred a few years ago whenn I needed to retrieve a forgotten password. The coworker/system, instead of generating a new password and emailing it to me and forcing me to immediately change it, brought the password up in the clear. I use, shall we say, racy, embarrassing passwords. They haven’t been compromised and I remember them but I don’t want others to know what they are for the obvious reason that they are passwords but for the less obvious reason that the might be construed as very weird.
So it is weird and bad enough if one of your coworkers pulls up a password which embarrasses you. The other day I was at the library and…yep…you got it. I ask to see if I can view a history of books that I have checked out and the female librarian asks for my card number. I give it to her and as she is saying “the default password is “111111” which I had changed at first logon, she is somehow pulling up my account with my “not for public consumption password” and telling me that I have such and such checked out.
Well I know what I had currently checked out. I wanted to see a history of all of the books I had checked out. I think that they can’t keep that info for privacy reasons though I may be wrong about that. NTL, the librarian said that they might not be able to store all that info due to storage limitations. I kind of doubt that because all you need are a few fields like a card number linked to a user name, and every book that had been checked out on that card number. That database would not require that many fields and take up that much disk space in my estimation.
The bottom line is why do we still have major databases systems out there that store passwords in the clear? If you are a system administrator and can reset passwords, whether or not the password is in the clear is no matter. But if you are a hacker, it is a different story. No serious computer system should store passwords in the clear!