I’m currently designing a system that requires an admin to log in using a password. For certain reasons, it is difficult to set this password during installation, but it can be changed later.
My idea is this: If I leave the default password empty, it is so horridly insecure that every admin is going to fix this as soon as possible. If I were to use some kind of predefined password instead, admins may think “ah.. nobody would think I’ve got ‘defaultpassword’ as my password so it’s not very important to change.”
So the basic thought is to make it so terrible that even the most lazy people are going to do something about it.
Edit: In my case, it is impossible to have the password changed on first login. It has to be manually edited in an XML file. It’s a bad environment, but it’s difficult to change, that’s why I’m asking. I’d love to have a solution like for instance Windows does.
Edit: I never touched this topic, so I was not familiar with the related issues. I proposed such a crazy idea! I see I still have to learn a lot. I’ll leave this open for a while, then accept the most voted answer. Thanks for the insight!
I would never advise setting a default password to be empty, especially for an administrator.
As another solution along the same lines, create a generated high entropy, cryptic (my example is nowhere cryptic, but it’s an example) first-time password so your user will think:
“Wow, f45zaH67 is something I’ll never remember, let me go ahead and change that”