Context is that I had to register for a lot of accounts recently and some of the rules really make no sense.
Not name-and-shaming, but the best one I’ve seen recently is I might have accidentally performed an XSS attack on a career portal using a 40-digit randomly generated password…
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
By far the worst is the costa rican national bank:
- Must be between 8 and 16 characters long
- Must have at least 4 letters and 4 numbers
- Can’t have consecutively repeated characters (can’t do “aa” but can do “aba”)
- Can’t have vowels or Ñ
- Must not be one of your last 6 passwords
- Must be changed every 90 days
- Also forgot that their website and app try to block password managers and copy and paste