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”.
The 20 character length limit is so annoying because I once had 2 distinct passwords (not in use anymore) that were both coincidentally 21 characters long. Character limiting me by a single character at the end of those old passwords was annoying because I usually ended up, for some services I needed, having to change up and use a completely new password. Back when I was a lot worse about reusing passwords than now.
Fuck1ngKil!M3
My bank used to not let me type one longer than six (6) characters!
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/
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.
And my bank wont accept ANY special characters.
That’s security theater for you…
I went through that bullshit so many times trying to get the characters etc then the next step said not available try again later…
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.
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.
On your phone, you can select autofill, then ask bitwarden to generate a password, save and use that to register
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.
If it converts one person that is a good thing.
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.
I’ve seen even shorter limits. Still annoying.
Super long passwords aren’t going to do you any good when their database is compromised and sold to anyone with a few bucks.
Its not like some one is gonna be brute forcing your account password, it would lock your account after like ten tries.
Quite the contrary.
Password hashing is standard nowadays.
When a database is compromised, brute forcing hashes is necessary to recover passwords, and the short ones are the first ones to be recovered.
So what? They’ll get your single use randomly generated password months/years/decades after you’ve already changed it?
Which begs the question, how often do people really change their passwords unless they’re forced to? This feels like the sort of thing that somebody should have studied.
Literally this
I got to rule #16 - I suck at chess. Secret to “multiply roman numerals” is just add them up to the value.
Except todays wordle answer cannot be made to multiply to 35
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?
Calculating hashes is supposedly more expensive for longer strings. That could be used to simplify some kind of overload attack like DDOS.
If they’re using md5 (which would be in line with their security practices), the block size is 512 bits. That means that everything less than 64 characters is the same cost
If they’re not already rate-limiting login attempts that’s another huge problem…
since the plain text isnt stored
I’m not sure I’d accept a bet on that assumption.
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.
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.
I had an account there with a proton email address and suddenly I couldn’t log in anymore. After 6 months of calling, someone finally told me proton emails are blocked because they are not secure. So I changes it to a tutanota email
What a clusterf**k
I almost used my proton mail because I can create an alias, where equifax would not accept a plused gmail account.
LOL
I hate stupid character limits. Not everyone uses, “passwords”… I type out a damn sentence.
And I use password manager, I don’t care of its 52 chars long, I just use the software to fill the field
Yeah BitWarden is a good little tool for saving and creating randomized character passwords.
I recommend Diceware for generating memorable passwords of sufficient complexity…but also, a password manager.
I use a 5 word phrase generated by my password locker. I will add a symbol or three to it if required.
I always get a chuckle when financial institutions have requirements like these, or lack 2FA. My Lemmy account has more security at this point.
