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”.
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.
If its not been pwned then why bother? As long as you’re using a password generator and only using per a service passwords plus MFA youll be fine
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
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.
The first part I’m sure about because I had to create a bookmark of a line of javascript that would bypass the on-screen keyboard and allow you to autofill the password. It was sometime in the last 3 or 4 years that they finally joined the 1990s and updated it
@nokturne213 In Canada, we also have transunion; they officially say max pw size is 30 but it’s actually 15. Complete joke. At least Equifax has proper 2FA.
I tried to log in to see if I could activate 2FA and it says I have to call customer service to log in now.
Don’t worry this is easily solved by sending a fax of your drivers license Mo-Fr between the hours of 8:05am and 8:09am
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.
If it converts one person that is a good thing.
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!
On your phone, you can select autofill, then ask bitwarden to generate a password, save and use that to register
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 went through that bullshit so many times trying to get the characters etc then the next step said not available try again later…
Open a bug report
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.
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.
I always get a chuckle when financial institutions have requirements like these, or lack 2FA. My Lemmy account has more security at this point.
That’s security theater for you…
that is a painfully bad list of
requirementsbullshitHuh - they increased it!
