High Entropy

Yesterday at work I was alone in a chatroom with someone and he accidentally exposed his password to me.

I instantly recognised what it was because, like mine, it had a mix of letters, numbers and special characters. I tried to look away, but I knew I'd seen his password and he knew I'd seen his password too. It felt awkward.

What surprised me was just how normal it looked. This person has a lot of experience in IT, and I would have guessed he'd have a long, highly secure password. In reality, his password was just an average length and it even had a dictionary word in it.

We both lol'd about it, and I told him I'd pretend I'd never seen it, and he said he trusted me, but that he was going to change it anyway. The next time I saw him, it was a little hard to make eye contact.

I think the moral of the story is that everyone has a password, and none of them are that special. You should always keep your password to yourself.