Lieberman gets deeper into identity with Random Password Generator

Phil Lieberman definitely knows how to make lemonade. Back in the 1980s, he and his organization, Lieberman Software saw that a brand new graphical user interface was going to take the consumer and business markets by storm – but he also knew it would have to be rounded out with the tools and utilities that IT departments - and savvy users - like to have on hand. So he quickly became the go-to guy for third party utilities, namely for OS/2.

But contrast what Lieberman did to the actions of a much larger software company – WordPerfect. WP also chose to bet on OS/2 and failed miserably when it tried to recover with a poorly designed, poorly executed Windows version. From being the No. 1 word processing company in the world, it fell onto such hard times that Novell, which had purchased the company, almost had to give it away to avoid the red ink that keeping it would have caused.

Lieberman (did I mention “lemonade”?) saw an opportunity, and quickly launched a service to migrate desktops from OS/2 to Windows which was, by all accounts, very successful.

Since then, Lieberman has simply responded to his customers’ needs and desires and provided the tools that get the job done. Over the past couple of years, that has included tools in the identity field, such as User Manager Pro and Service Account Manager. One neat tool I saw when I ran into Lieberman at the recent Gartner ID Summit was the Random Password Generator (available stand-alone or as part of the User Manager Suite). This nifty service works with Microsoft Windows, Linux, or Unix systems, Microsoft SQL Server databases, or Cisco IOS devices to “…automatically and periodically give each account on every system their own unique cryptographically complex passwords and allows secure and time limited recovery of these credentials in a fully audited and controlled environment.” (Lieberman can speak in a stilted way when he puts his marketing hat on!)

Not a year goes by without a story in one security journal or another about the number of devices (and, it seems, particularly Cisco devices) which are rolled out with the default root/superuser passwords unchanged – a hacker’s bonanza. Random Password Generator ensures that your most valuable accounts remain secure. That’s worth the few dollars it will cost you.

Check it out and see if it won’t help improve your security.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.