Almost 20 years ago, I worked with this (not particularly competent) sysadmin. Policy said the root password had to be rotated once a month. So, in July 2003, they set the root password to blah0307 (where blah was some random word, which I forget now but knew at the time.) I wasn’t actually supposed to know the root password, but one of my colleagues let me in on the secret, including the repetitive pattern. I think the security auditor ticked the box “root password changed every 30 days”, but never asked what the password actually was.

I know some places have rules like “must have at least N characters different from previous passwords”. However, depending on the exact rule, people can come up with easy-to-remember workarounds: e.g. the “blah” bit is ”foo” in even months and “bar” in odd ones.

I'm sure they meant something analog like on a sticky note rather than in a password manager, where it should be stored.

My bank still won’t let me paste a password so at least that bank doesn’t mean use a password manager!

If you start dragging a password from 1Password, the window disappears and you can release your mouse over a field elsewhere, and it will get typed in there (instead of pasting). This may or may not work for your case.

Even more so, I think writing down passwords on paper is actually pretty good security:

An attacker can only hack the paper with physical access to my office. But if they have that, they might as well install an physical keylogger.

You can also combine a written down fragment of the password with a remembered one.

> An attacker can only hack the paper with physical access to my office.

... and there are lots of unrelated people with physical access to your office. Cleaning staff, building maintenance, HVAC technicians, printer service staff... and all of these may not have the same level of background checks as your company has.

And even if you hire all of these yourself (which makes sense at a certain scale), that still doesn't protect you against marketing inviting a camera crew and walking around everywhere in one of these typical "life at the office" short films for Linkedin. IT staff offices seem to be very popular for such films since they're usually the most personalized rooms with lots of nerd stuff on the walls and desks.

Besides: swiping a photo of a post-it leaves no evidence, whereas installing a physical keylogger certainly does.

Nobody said the piece of paper has to be a post-it on your monitor. It could in a folder in a locked cabinet.

Yes. What I had in mind when I wrote my comment, was to stick the piece of paper in your wallet. But your suggestion also works.

Just write it in your class syllabus; no one will ever find it there.

You missed the point of what I said, I was just using examples that are the responsibility of the employee.