I’ve seen a horror story in the form of “[HELP] sysadmin wont give encryption keys” post to a forum. Mid-2000s, non-English so I’m paraphrasing.
The sysadmin resigned, no tech person anymore. The boss got a lost password inquiry from a customer, panicked, called former admin for help, not a single word he understood, hit the forum.
And in the forum post he said the admin “wouldn’t cooperate”, “very adamant and confrontational” about “giving out encryption keys” to “decrypt valuable customer database we can’t afford to rebuild but might have to” and how it’s driving the company towards bankruptcy over last few days etc etc.
Eventually forum members realized he’s talking about a password reset, and convinced him it’s actually impossible to recover hashed password nor it’s necessary which is the point, you just verify identity and let them change the password etc etc, but it took hours for the community, on top of a day and half or so of tense hours for the boss guy’s company, to just understand the situation and act accordingly.
So I think it might be worth communicating how passwords work every once in a while.
The sysadmin resigned, no tech person anymore. The boss got a lost password inquiry from a customer, panicked, called former admin for help, not a single word he understood, hit the forum.
And in the forum post he said the admin “wouldn’t cooperate”, “very adamant and confrontational” about “giving out encryption keys” to “decrypt valuable customer database we can’t afford to rebuild but might have to” and how it’s driving the company towards bankruptcy over last few days etc etc.
Eventually forum members realized he’s talking about a password reset, and convinced him it’s actually impossible to recover hashed password nor it’s necessary which is the point, you just verify identity and let them change the password etc etc, but it took hours for the community, on top of a day and half or so of tense hours for the boss guy’s company, to just understand the situation and act accordingly.
So I think it might be worth communicating how passwords work every once in a while.