• If someone has intercepted/cracked your password, changing it will block their access.
• Umm…

I’m sure there are others… While I try to think of those, let’s look at the drawbacks:

• Whenever you change your password it is something more that you have to remember. Passwords are usually required to be 6-10 characters, even though the human short-term memory can, generally, only remember between five and nine things of a particular kind: letters, digits, words etc. A new 10 character password every 30 days is keeping that overworked brain very busy.
• People have bad memories and often forget their new passwords which results in lost time, lost productivity and general stress and frustration. This applies not only to the user forgetting the password, but the poor sod who has to reset 100 passwords every month because people keep forgetting what their new password is.
• If you need to remember something what do you do?… I write it down. Surely an old password that no-one knows is more secure than a new password written down on paper/txt document with a username and website so that you can remember what this password is for. Don’t write this one off… In client places, I have seen post-its on the monitor with eBay, internet banking and email username and password combinations labeled just to name a few.
• When put on the spot (your password has expired, please enter a new one, NOW!) – people are more likely to just make “an easy password for now and change it later”. We all know that these never get changed.

This is just my take on the ever frustrating process of remembering far too many passwords and having to change those far too often.

The inspiration for this post was an error message I got at work today while trying to use my old password, forgetting that it had expired and I now have a new one. The message made me giggle:

Login Failed:

# You may have typed the wrong password
# This user ID may not exist
# If you are a resident of Italy, your password may have expired.

Moral of the story is, watch out Italians.