HN Explorer

Ask HN: How to efficiently update passwords for a 36+ accounts

4 points by creativeone ↗ HN
My colleague sitting next to me was stuck today with the task of updating passwords on all employee accounts at 3rd party websites that we use (around 3 main sites that we use). Its going to take him just about about an entire day's work to change the passwords for each employee at each of the 3rd party sites.

We have passwords changed either every quarter, or when an employee leaves the company, whichever comes first.

Is there a faster, more simple way to do this that we have overlooked?

6 comments

[ 8.3 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] thread
viraptor
Writing a quick script that will log in, change password, logout may be quicker than doing this manually... And even if it turns out not to be quicker this time, you will have it ready for the next quarter.
creativeone
How would you deal with captcha? Could we avoid that altogether? Or make it the only action on the user's part is to enter the captchas?
viraptor
Yeah - you'd have to download and display those... possible but more time consuming. I haven't seen a service which requires captcha on password change before - if that's the case then you have a problem.

Alternatively if you have 30+ paid accounts with some small company, you could ask them for whitelisting your ip. They might be interested in doing this.

creativeone
No small companies, big 3, google, yahoo, bing.
devs1010
deathbycaptcha or some other similar service, used to be one called decaptcher I think but looks like its down now.
cd34
Have him tell each employee to change their password. The work is distributed among the 36+, takes him less than 5 minutes to send the email to all employees.

Also avoids the obvious security implications that somewhere there is a file that contains all employees passwords.