Ask Lemmy

Not sure if it falls under the same category, but the way Activision handles (handled? I haven't used them since) passwords was atrocious! I had to reset my password to get back into my account, I used a random diceware password, it accepted it. However! The client on both Windows and Xbox wouldn't let you input a password longer than I believe 20 characters. So while you can set a 25 character password, you can go fuck yourself if you actually wanna log in...

My work was using some MS-based account system, but I don't know if this was stock or something they modified. When you had to change your password, it would tell you if your new password didn't meet the password requirements, as usual. What it wouldn't tell you was what those requirements were...

So yeah, the requirements the system won't tell you about would have to be the worst one i came across...

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 had a wi-fi device a few years ago that would require a password up to 12 characters, but that requirement wasn’t explicitly written anywhere. The device would gladly accept a 13-character password, for example, but you would never be able to log in again (factory-resetting was the only way to undo).

More recently I purchased a Lennox HVAC system that came with their proprietary thermostat (an Android tablet with a wall mount). During the Christmas break I got myself a new wi-fi router and had to reconfigure all my wireless devices. After 2 days, the Lennox thermostat was the last device to join the new wi-fi network… and it failed because their password could have any character EXCEPT the asterisk — and my new password had an asterisk. I didn’t like the idea of redoing all my other devices AGAIN just because of this idiotic password rule, so I ended up creating a new SSID just for the thermostat. I named it LENNOXSUCKS.

One special character.

Seems logic right? Until you get that it is one and one only. Took me some time.

Max length of something under 18 …

Irks my gears

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.

Password needs one special character.
Not at least one. Exactly one.

I add to make a password last fall that had the requirement "numerals or special characters". A password with both numerals and special characters wouldn't work.

Probably the silliest thing I have run into was some game. It asked you to set two passwords. You needed both to login. The second password couldn't be changed. This is why it was secure, see. (...What.)

When I created my account and set the second password, I couldn't log on the second time. Because I had entered a 20 character second password. It was accepted and verified during the account creation just fine. On the second login, it only accepted 16 characters. (It let you enter 20 characters but said it was too long.) Trying to enter first 16 characters of the second password didn't work, of course.

I then contacted the support, and they did manage to reset the second password anyway. (What is this even)

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.

I hate any password requirement that says "special characters" but has a list of exceptions, like no . , ! ; or empty spaces. Just tell the user to make a passphrase, enforce at least one empty space and, dunno, 25 characters minimum, and bam. It's not like hackers try brute force anymore, they just hack insecure DBs full of user data and use that everywhere.

The worst I've ever seen was a site that required passwords to be 4 digits.

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.

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?

Not really a requirement, but my WiFi router has the admin password written on it as usual, but when you enter it and click ok, the password field fills up with characters and login doesn't work. What has to be done instead, is you have to click forgot password, enter the same password you just got denied with, and after changing it (to the same password) it just boots you into admin mode. You don't even have to confirm tour identity.

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) 🤣

Wikipedia's minimum password length is 1 character

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A company I used to work for is big enough that everyone reading this has heard of it. They had this wonderful security nightmare going on:

When you were hired, the company would issue your user credential with a standard password that was "CompanyName1" and require you to immediately change it at first logon. Everyone knew this password because everyone got it when they were hired.

Password policy required everyone to reset their password every 60 days. Not the worst ever but still pretty aggressive. And with the rise of all the mobile devices connecting with your corp account it was getting to be a worse and worse experience.

Can you guess yet how these two policies are linked in my story?

Well, some of the C-Suite executives didn't have time for any of these security shenanigans. So they would have their executive support person log into an administrative console and reset the exec's password every 59 days to the same value that it currently had, thereby bypassing the password re-use filter.

That value they were continuously setting was... "CompanyName1"

I know of at least two executives that were doing this while I worked there.

Extremely limited password length. I think it was around 6 or 8 characters. Exactly! So every password was the same length.

No other requirements. The best part? It was a bank. But not a customer facing service.

Facebook got caught having a flat text file being send around between employees to make accessing data easier. That text file contained tens of thousands of peoples username and password.

Why? Facebook being facebook I guess

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.