How were passwords recovered after 9/11?

Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees on September 11, 2001. The firm had planned for disaster: everyone was supposed to tell their work password to four nearby colleagues. But most of its 960 New York staff were missing, and no one knew the passwords to hundreds of accounts it needed to reopen. Microsoft sent more than thirty security experts, who explained that guessing would go faster with personal details about each of them.

So less than a day after the towers fell, the firm’s chief executive phoned spouses, parents, and siblings and worked gently through the experts’ checklist: “What is your wedding anniversary? Tell me again where he went for undergrad? You guys have a dog, don’t you? What’s her name?” He never called anyone dead, only “not available right now,” and he never hung up first.

The firm was back in operation within two days. As the New York Times put it, the sentimentality that made the passwords weak turned out to be the firm’s saving grace.