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.
Update: I have been unable to log into my account for the last 3 days now. Every time I try I get a page saying to call customer service. After a total of 2 hours on hold I finally found the issue, you cannot connect to Equifax using a VPN. In addition there is no option for 2FA (not even email or sms) and they will hang up on you if you push the issue of their security being lax. Their reasoning for lax security and no vpn usage is “well all of our other customers are okay with this”.
Yeah well, if you’re so smart let’s see you write a website in COBOL.
no spaces in a string is a dead giveaway that theres Cobol in there somewhere meow
meow
?
their name is kittykittycatboys what else do you expect :3 meow
It shows up on my screen as merely “max”, nothing else.
Username and display name can be set independently, you should have a “Display name” field in settings. Their non-unique display name is “max” and their unique username is “@[email protected]”. If you check their profile you should see both.
If you don’t set a display name it will be the same as your username, if you set display name to the same as username (like I have) it’ll show your username without the instance even to people on other instances.
Where would max even come from? That’s not in their username o.O
You joke, but…
- https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/visual-cobol/vc70/VS2017/GUID-78091B18-A9B3-4212-BE5F-3E28C7196413.html
- https://github.com/loveOSS/awesome-cobol
(No, I will never forgive the college I went to for undergrad for forcing us to take two semesters of COBOL. Why do you ask?)
This implies they’re storing the plaintext password.
Ideally the password would be hashed with a salt and then stored. Then it’s a fixed length field and it shouldn’t matter how long the password is.
Or a very very old database system, possibly DB2, where you can’t change the column limits or data types after the fact.
If they’re hashing, the column size should be irrelevant. Ideally the database should never see the plaintext password in the first place (though I could understand calculating the hash in the query itself). If they’re not hashing, they should really be rewriting their database anyway.
Salted passwords are not recommended anymore. Better to use a memory hard key derivation function designed for passwords, like Argon.
Those are salted, they just do it for you.
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.
A hash has a fixed length, including MD5. There’s no reason to cap password (input) Iength. You can hash the whole bible and still get the same length hash. So either they don’t even hash it, they’re idiots, or they try to be unnecessarily cautious to avoid some other limit / overflow, like POST max size (which would still be counted in at least KB, not several characters). The limit on what special characters you can use is also highly suspicious - that’s not how you deal with injections / escaping your inputs.
Hashing takes longer the longer the string is, so it technically could impact performance if many people with very long passwords log in simultaneously. 20 characters is ridiculous though, you could probably cap it at hundreds and still be completely fine.
My default is to generate a 32 character password and store it in a password manager. Doesn’t matter to me how many characters it has since I’m just going to copy and paste it anyway.
Pretty surprising how many places enforce shorter passwords though… I had a bank that had a maximum character limit of 12. I don’t bank with them anymore. Short password limits is definitely is an indicator of bad underlying security practices.
Imagine having to contract with a company in order for them not to fuck your life up with your own data. This is ridiculous.
that they collect without your explicit consent
short passwords because they are trying to save bandwidth for their next time their entire database structure is downloaded
They’re supposed to be hashed so that shouldn’t matter
Unless that’s the joke or something
Credit bureaus are not for your protection, they’re for the protection of their clients, the banks.
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.
You are unable to paste your password into the “confirm password” field. I thought I was going to have to type it in, but Bitwarden’s autofill worked.
My bank used to not let me type one longer than six (6) characters!
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.
My bank disables paste as has code checking if the browser is greater than Netscape Navigator 4.
Goddamn I really hate that shit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/
I swear password restrictions are getting to the point where there’s eventually going to only be one usable password.
Yeah, it’s counterproductive to lay out a bunch of restrictions. Let people make a long-ass password that’s a memorable phrase - it’s safer anyway.
Although I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.
I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.
Password reuse. Password reuse everywhere.
We’re all guilty of it. No shame in admitting it. I know I’ve been guilty of it from time to time.
When I have to sign up for something on my phone I will use my pre Bitwarden default password. Then once I have a sec to sit down iPad or laptop I will change it to something more secure.
I am currently fighting with my wife and children to start using a password manager.
The funny thing about that is that I am currently on my laptop getting keepassxc set up. This post has somehow motivated me to finally get a password manager.
On your phone, you can select autofill, then ask bitwarden to generate a password, save and use that to register
What’s the best password manager you’d recommend?
I have only used lastpass (they have had several breeches and I do not recommend them), Bitwarden (my current daily driver and my recommendation), and I have used Apple keychain a little for passwords at work that my wife can access without having full access to my Bitwarden.
Thank you!
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.
that is a painfully bad list of
requirementsbullshitI 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.
In case anybody’s curious about what those are:
- https://rublon.com/blog/nydfs-23-nycrr-part-500-mfa-compliance/
- https://metomic.io/resource-centre/financial-services-compliance-regulations
- https://rublon.com/blog/ffiec-mfa-compliance-best-practices/
- https://www.ffiec.gov/press/pdf/Authentication-and-Access-to-Financial-Institution-Services-and-Systems.pdf
The biggest reason they use phone calls or SMS, however, is because they don’t want to go to the hassle of getting an in-house MFA service (a TOTP backend, in other words), approved, pen tested, analyzed, verified… all things considered, it’s faster and easier to go with a service like Twilio that already did all that legwork. A couple of years back I worked for a company in just that position, and after we did all the legwork, research, and consultation with the independent third party specialists trying to run our own TOTP would have easily doubled the yearly cost because of all the compliance stuff.
Adding TOTP would be cheaper in the long run than continuing to pay those SMS rates. I dont think its about any kind of extra hassle they have to deal with. More of terrible NIST standards written by the center for internet security, which is a for profit corporation that apparently nist allows to write all their standards
It really depends on the company. When I was working for that company a few jobs back, we crunched the numbers and the cost of C&C and IV&V (Certification and Accreditation; Independent Verification and Validation) for an in-house TOTP had one more zero to the left of the decimal point than the Twilio bill (added up for the year). Plus, for compliance we’d have to get everything re-vetted yearly.
That’s kinda of the definition of government contracting. :) I think the only US government org that has actual govvies doing anything other than management is NASA.
Yeah except you only have to spend the money once as opposed to paying twilio every year
for compliance we’d have to get everything re-vetted yearly
Literally this
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
Oh but wait! That non-customizable
account numberuser ID that you have to wait for in the mail is definitely top notch security!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.
In Germany at least, I hear that banks have weird law requirements for these weird security things, like photoTAN.
I’d be much happier if they’d just let me do my usual setup with password, totp and my hardware token.
In the US the FDIC sets security requirements for banks and audits annually, and they keeps raising requirements every year or so. At this point its just easier for a bank to invest in following current best practices and keep updating to the current best practices than to keep chasing every new finding on the FDIC audits each year
Source: I worked in IT at a bank for a while
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”
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?
As expected, their security measures were also found to be lacking.
Yeah, no thanks.
yeah I only have a ring for my outdoor cameras. I was considering switching my indoor system yo ring as my alarm company keeps raising their prices but I’m not putting ring cameras inside my house. especially because the privacy shutters on them are manual
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.
Huh - they increased it!
