I enter my password, and it tells me that I “need to change my password immediately”. It won’t let me use my account, unless I type in a new password or enter the old password 10 times or so.

After repeatedly entering the old password, it will eventually unlock my screen. However, the system date increases by a few hundred years and wifi stops working. Everything turns back to normal after rebooting.

This hasn’t happened for a while now, but it used to happen every few weeks. I find it really strange, both the system date and wifi bug, and the fact that I am demanded to change my password.

Did this happen to anyone else, and does anyone know what and who might have caused this? I am curious.

(The distro is debian 12 and the lock-screen/desktop-environment is GNOME 43.6)

    • Wildebeest@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      I was going to reinstall soon anyways, because I wanted to use full disk encryption. If the whole asking-to-change-password thing is just a random bug or a malicious activity, the reinstall would take care of that. But if it is a design choice or a common issue with either debian or GNOME (that can not easily be fixed), I might reconsider my choice of distro and desktop-environment, before doing the reinstall. I will wait a bit to see if anyone can identify the issue

  • ____@infosec.pub
    0·
    1 year ago

    If the clock is off (bad CMOS battery, as others have noted); and there is a password “max age” setting that’s intended to be far, far, far in the future…

    Well, your clock being off by a few hundred years might well trigger the (intended never) expiration setting.

    Malware is a possibility, but I lean towards the date being the cause rather than an effect.

  • PhineaZ@feddit.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    Certainly not a computer expert, but consider the option that the battery on your motherboard might be running low. If the hardware itself is older, I would try swapping the button cell. I’ve seen many weird issues get resolved this way, although in theory it should not mess up anything but system time.