Stupid bank app doesn’t allow password managers… and if you hit the enter button to login you get an error message informing you that you need to mouse click on the button.

I volunteer at a local high school and the students password is their birthday, because they are given their account at age 5, in kindergarten, and it’s something you can reasonably expect a 5 year old to remember. Also, the students are not allowed to change their password unless they get “hacked”, which is usually just another student logging into their account and deleting their assignments.

Worked somewhere that required security clearance that used your national insurance number (UK equivalent to SSN) as your login id. Most people in the UK do not memorise their NI number.

Password had to be uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters, I think at least 12? Couldn’t have back to back special characters or start or end with numbers. No whole words, either.

So now you have to remember two strings of letters and numbers. Sackable offensive to write either down. I once got a phone call from security because I would miss enter my password after lunch first time around, just once a day, but they rang me up still to see what going on.

Security there was a nightmare, worked with an obviously disabled guy, who forgot to put his disabled badge on his car dashboard and they threatened to ban him from site (which would result in the sack as you couldn’t work remotely). The kicker was that they said we know you forgot to put the badge out, so they knew he was disabled as all car registrations are preregistered only way onsite.

Any service that says I must have a 12 or 14 string password, combined with symbols, numbers and letters.

Do you know why, I have to keep resetting my password, services that have this dumb requirement? Because your fucking requirements are absurd and unnecessary. I don’t have the mental capacity to care to remember that long of a password. I have to have a document now of all of the passwords I have so it’s not forgotten. I have to have browsers autofill for me because of this shit.

In a perfect world, 6 - 8 string passwords would suffice and lots of emphasis on symbols and numbers at the very least. The longer you try making the characters of a password, the chances of forgetting increases.

Flickr does this. Some of the portals to my apartment portal does this. Portals to some of my medical information does this. It’s fucking bullshit. StateFarm does this too.

I needed to get a certificate for digitally submitting my taxes. This, of course, requires me to set a password for it. The tax office’ web site lists a number of requirements and rejects any password that does not match those (so it said). So far, so good, the usual stuff, lower and upper case, numbers, special characters, minimum lenght. No surprises there.

For one of the “special characters” I used “ö” (umlaut o), which is a normal character in my language (which is the same as the tax offices, so they should be aware of those). The web site filter happily accepted this password containing the “ö”. But the back engine got a severe case of digital diarrhea from it. I had to clear my caches and cookies to completely re-starting the application process.

Another password SNAFU I had many years ago in a place using TN3270 terminals. To those who have never seen such a thing, it is a so-called “smart terminal”. It does not send and receive single characters like a telnet or SSH session, but the host sends a mask to the terminal, defining fields that can be filled out, and with a “send” or “function” key (IIRC) you could send the data back. Those fields had fixed lengths, of course. You might guess the problem…

So the login screen had two fields of eight characters each: “Username” and “Password”. I entered the credentials I have been given and sent them. The first thing I did was to select “change password”. It opened a form with three fields: “old password”, “new password”, and “repeat new password”. Nothing odd about that, but the fields had twelve characters. So, not knowing the particulars of that system (I was used to UNIX style terminals back then), I entered a new password that was longer than eight characters. Guess what? I logged out, I tried to log in, I was stuck. I had to ask my admin to reset my password. And had found the first of many, many bugs in that system.

12 characters, upper/lower/special requirement, and no more than two occurrences of the same character together. That’s FedEx.

Two other thoughts on the topic:

• Websites/apps/etc should always list their password requirements on the login page to make it easier to determine what password you used for the site in question.
• There are plenty of websites where I literally log in only by using the “forgot password” flow because their password requirements are so ridiculous.

Anyone remember the Password Game?

I personally hate character limits. I understand minimum character count, but I can’t have more than 15 characters? Bruh

The most basic rules commonly required everywhere. When you have such specific rules, it ironically actually makes finding the password through brute force easier because you can eliminate a bunch of variables that could have existed without all the rules. I can eliminate any permutation under 8 characters, doesn’t contain a number, and doesn’t contain a special character.

It will still possibly take a billion years to guess, but it could have been two billion without the rules.

Of course, I also find it wild that the metric for how good an encryption or password system is, is just how long it would take to guess every possible combination of input it could be, sequentially. It doesn’t account for a brute force attempt that just selects random inputs. It could take until the heat death of the universe… It could take 3 seconds. It’s up to chance at that point. Not to mention all the easier ways of getting a password. Like gaslighting the person who knows it into giving it up.

Not so much password requirements as just a completely removed implementation:

To access payment stubs in a data center (not us) that I worked at, the user account was our public email address and the password was a personal code, sorta like SSN, but that code could be easily looked up as it was public info.

I showed the director of HR, who authorized this her own payment stub as evidence that this was baaaaadddd

So she asked me to check that system for more issues

Turns out it stored passwords in blank (wtf) and would authenticate with two queries. First query would check if the username (email) exists. Second query would check if the password exists. If both exists, you’re in! So i could login to any account with MY password…

This is a tip of a very big iceberg there

Passwords that must contain a special character, but only from a list of three special characters.

Passwords that must be changed every 3 months.

Absurdly narrow length requirements, im 80% sure I saw one that required 8-16 characters.

All dictionary words were banned from being in a password regardless of length, so passphrases weren’t allowed.

My community colleges:

Passwords must be 12 characters long, contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, a number, and a special character; it must also be changed every 30 days. There was also some sort of alogarithm that checked if your new password is too similar to any previous password you had used, and rejected it if it was too close.

Hilariously, if you had a link to the page the password was supposed to limit access to, you could bypass the password page entirely. As such, I never changed my password.

1. There was the multi user operating system in the 1990s that required every user to have a unique password. We were young and innocent then and used common English words. Upon changing your password, it would check your new password against all other users. An error like

That password is already used by johnp. Please choose another password.

was not uncommon.

2. When I started using a password manager, I got keen and changed my passwords to 64 random characters. My bank would change this to uppercase, delete special characters, and save the first 8 characters of what was left. So when I logged in, it would compare the 64 character password I entered to the converted 8 character password that they saved, and find that they were different. (I found this out when I rang and complained, and they told me my password over the phone … 😱). They don’t do that any more.

The oddest I’ve ever encountered: EXACTLY 15 characters long. No more, no fewer. 15.

Honorable mention: Various online accounts where I used my password manager to generate a long, secure password, which the website accepted without warning or error. I was then locked out because their user management system could not handle such long passwords (had to create a second account with a much shorter password to find that out) 🤣

Not allowing you to paste a password, so you have to type it manually every time.

My old bank required you to have a password 12 characters long exactly, and to login you have to give the characters in specific places.

I would ask you what are the 4th, 7th, and 11th letters of your password.

Anyone want to guess why that aren’t my bank anymore?