You work for a small city IT department and you get a call f

You work for a small city IT department, and you get a call from a user in City Hall who has forgotten her password. What is your response?

A. You locate the list of passwords you have for all employees, find hers, and tell what her password is over the phone.

B. You locate the list of authorized passwords for her department, choose one, go to her computer, and using your administrator password to gain access to her PC, you set her password.

C. You reset the password on her computer to a temporary password, give her the temporary password, and then advise her that she will need to change the password to a permanent password that no one knows.

D. You tell her to look under her keyboard. All employees have their passwords taped under their keyboards for just such an occasion.

Solution

C. When a user forgets her password, in an Active Directory environment, you can reset it to a temporary password that will allow the user to log in, and then she will need to set a permanent password at her next login. Typically in an Active Directory environment, passwords automatically expire at the end of a certain time period, usually 90 days. Users must create a new password at or before the expiration date. If it’s not an Active Directory environment, usually the IT department has an administrative password set on the local computer so that the techs can gain access if necessary. The tech sets the user’s account with a temporary password, and then the user is told to set a password no one knows.