World Password Day Fun: Share Your Password Horror Stories

Unfortunately not a joke or funny story, but lots of facepalms. Working as an external consultant for a financial institute some years ago we were unfortunately stuck in the office restoring something to a system and had to wait a significant time for it to complete. Being challenged, bullied and remanded for 'clean desk policy' we decided to have a go at it as two external contractors. Besides the usual stuff one would not expect given clean desks, we found no doors to offices were locked - so the usual 'numerical' combination for some managers cabinet in his rolodex - scribbled notes of IP addresses and sometimes usernames or passwords on documents or some discarded post-it. So all the shizzle up to then was true - and then even more so - at no less than the firewall-management team at two operator desks we found their main firewall passwords. And you guessed it, on the underside of their keyboards. Unfortunately though I have to admit it wasn't a facepalm moment right away, we were too flabbergasted. Side-note; don't ever do this - especially as a contractor - without aligning in advance. We got away with it with a small slap on the wrist, but the findings fully outweighted our discrepancy.