I was just re-visiting a customer site to continue helping them with their Privileged Password Management deployment when I passed someone in the break room who called out "How's it going, Password Guy?"

Password Guy? Well, I guess I have been talking about passwords for 10-plus years now, so I guess I can't complain too much… but it did get me wondering… how is it that I've been talking about passwords for 10 years? Has this problem really been going on for 10-plus years? Actually, as you are about to learn, it's been going on for much longer, and isn't going anywhere any time soon.

When I first started dealing with the issue of passwords – back in the mid-1990s – that's pretty much what we had-passwords. Sure, tokens were the rage and soon we all had a token (two-factor authenticator), but I was still dealing with passwords. In this case, they were root passwords. The root passwords didn't use tokens, because tokens relied on a network, so you needed a password that would work at any time.