Signed up for Equifax to freeze my credit, password can not be longer than 20 characters
Not only does the credit bureau max out their password length, you have a small list of available non-alphanumeric characters you can use, and no spaces. Also you cannot used a plused email address, and it had an issue with my self hosted email alias, forcing me to use my gmail address.
Both Experian and transunion had no password length limitations, nor did they require my username be my email address.
A 20 character password of case insensitive letters and numbers is quite unbreakable (taking billions of years to brute force). Still, what a strange way to announce your database is old and you probably aren't hashing your password with anything stronger than MD5. Or worse.
I have seen this on a site before and I never understood why. Whats the point of limiting the length of the password? Its not to save storage space since the plain text isnt stored and the hash should be a uniform length. So whats the advantage?
Their backend is really, REALLY garbage. Maybe it is some of that Microsoft trash that they snake oil'd into a lot of public offices and dumbass corpo managers, but whatever is running that site, has me concerned. You don't do fucky things with passwords unless your backend is doing something really stupid.
Just wait until you get to Transunion's site. It is a dumpster fire of consisting of the worst sign up I've ever seen, "Contact our social team" and "If you haven't logged in for awhile create a new account. I could not believe how awful it was. I had to just call and do it over the phone.
Transunion was not too bad, and they did not require my full SSN, unlike Equifax. But transunion will not easily give me my credit score unlike the two Es.
Yup. My bank was even "translating" passwords to PINs behind the scene specifically so your password for the website would be the same as your password on the telephone.
the Ring app (I think) forced me to change my Wi-Fi password because I wasn't allowed to use ampersands. according to support it's because they "use ampersands in the code"
I encountered something like this at work. It wasn’t pass related, it was just a means of getting people to make text responses. Ampersands were replaced with some gibberish format, which annoyed everyone.
I got some kind of explanation from our tech people, which I understood to mean that ampersand was used to indicate that what followed was live code. Turning the ampersand into gibberish text was a safety measure to stop mischief.
I’ve noticed ampersand replacements in some news feeds too
You mean the company that had a feature in place that allowed law enforcement to request and access video footage from your devices without obtaining a warrant first?
It deeply saddens me when people pay money for locked down hardware that's not only designed to spy on them, but their family, friends, and neighbors as well. Ring, Amazon Echo, Google Home, that creepy Facebook robot screen...all insecure spyware.
Banks aren't much better. Up until just a couple years ago, the Treasury Direct website (to buy bonds/etc from the US Treasury) forced you to use a god damned on-screen keyboard to input your password and the passwords were not case sensitive. I'm pretty sure it also only read the first X number of characters of your input because I recall that people tried typing extra characters after their passwords and it would still accept it as valid, though I could be conflating this with some other archaic site.
I also like that the only type of MFA that all 3 agencies implement is text/phone call. Cause likes there's nonway someone could spoof a phone number and then unfreeze your credit.
Financial companies ans banks and stuff have to follow regulations on their MFA method. That why you can't just use any OTP authenticator and are stuck with email/SMS.
Financial institution security is quite frankly a freaking joke. My bank only has the options for 11 character passwords at maximum. It's like oh come on that is way too easy these days
Honestly, that's a sign to me that your bank doesn't take cybersecurity seriously and would possibly consider switching. Mine has amazing security as well as fraud detection. Sometimes it'll even send me a text to verify a purchase if their software thinks it's weird I got across town too quickly, though that's pretty rare so it isn't overly aggressive/inconvenient.
Oh boy. If you think this is bad, you should try waiting a few weeks or months after you're signed up this time, then sign up for a new account using your current details, just with a different email. Spoiler: if you can answer the security questions, you're home free.
And remember that between the Equifax leak and more recent hacks, at this point, every sensitive detail for every member of the economy is now in the hands of bad actors. If they want your shit, or into it, they'll social engineer it.
Should passwords have maximum character counts? Sure, to prevent overflow attacks (or whatever) by pasting five different analyses of the movie Primer as your password. It should be longer than 20 in any case. But are there other, way worse security issues? Yes.
@nokturne213 In Canada, we also have transunion; they officially say max pw size is 30 but it’s actually 15. Complete joke. At least Equifax has proper 2FA.
I went through that bullshit so many times trying to get the characters etc then the next step said not available try again later, then repeat that a few times. What BS a max of 20 characters is too.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say it: 16 Characters are sufficient and 20 pretty damn secure.
That is assuming they do stuff right and there are no vulnerabilities, which they won't and there are. However they may manifest, they are a greater concern at 16+ characters, especially if they don't offer 2FA.
The reason is that even if machines become powerful enough that 16 characters can be bruteforced, which they can't atm, you can effectively defend everything against bruteforce attacks by other means. Including but not limited to limiting login attempts, salts and pepper, multiple encryption layers etc.
With just a salt you can make a 16 char password effectively a 24 char password... Or a 2.000.000 char password. Assuming it is not stolen alongside that is.
That's not how salt works. It will be stolen alongside the password hash, because salt is necessarily in plaintext. It doesn't increase the guessability of passwords. It just makes it infeasible to precompute your guesses.
I tend to prefer pass phrases, they are a lot easier to type and speak, if required. Mine regularly blow past 20 characters.
As for salting, that only defends against rainbow table attacks. The salt needs to be stored along with the hash. That is find for most accounts, but once you're in banking territory, that's a bad bet.
You also can't assume you have no vulnerabilities. If someone gets your database, you can't defend against brute force attacks.
Lastly, if you are doing passwords properly, you shouldn't care much about length. There are a few dos attacks to worry about, but a 512 char limit will stop those, and not limit any sane password.
The actual length of the password isn't the problem.
If they were "doing stuff right" then it would make no difference to them whether the password was 20 characters or 200, because once it was hashed both would be stored in the same amount of space.
The fact that they've specified a limit is strong evidence that they'renot doing it right
Some hashing algorithms are suspectible to long password denial of service so it's recommended to limit the length of password but certainly not to 20 characters but to a more reasonable limit, like 100 characters or so.
It does, I'll give you that. However, I will hold the fact that their maximum is actually reasonable against that. The minimum of 8 is more concerning imo
I think 12345678901234aB+ would work though. If I am able to log in (I currently have to call customer service to be able to log in) I will try both of these passwords and see if either is accepted.