I just had to deal with my new electric company telling me that I couldn’t log in because my email was not in their system, but I couldn’t create a new account with that email because it was already in use within their system.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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That happened to be with Uber. Never could resolve it, then fraud happened in another country.
Tried to reach out to Uber to fix, was told to sign in to dispute. Couldn't. Called bank, bank said to settle with vendor. Still can't. Couldn't call them because they don't have phones.
Ended up going to the drivers depot and demanded they fix it since no one else could. Finally got them to delete it.
I will never trust a company that doesn't have a phone/call center. Online only? Get lost
Had that issue when trying to use the app of one of the major package delivery services. Can't register email because it is in use. Can't login because password is not correct. Can't reset the password because I get a weird error message. My credentials worked for some other part of their services but not here. Tried to contact support about it twice but got no response so I ditched using it. I'll survive getting email and SMS notifications, thank you. If I need to send something I'll just use one of the other services instead. The old dinosaurs of delivery services are so far behind in technology and user experience it's crazy but they rely on competing in b2b so it doesn't matter to them.
But you forgot the rule where it couldn't be more than 12 characters long, so you didn't try the correct variation until the validation error for the password reset told you what the rules are.
THIS is the one that makes me the angriest.
I'm happy to comply with your complexity requirements, but don't tell me about each one only when I've failed to meet it. That's really past the bar of shitty design into the realm of asshole design.
I had an account with a bank that got bought. Always used the app, which worked fine, but I needed some document I could only get from the website. Go to log in and it gives me all sorts of weird errors. Support made me reset my password, all that stuff. I figured it out. Old bank would let you log in with email or username. New bank only let you log in with username, except it had dropped old bank's username and put the email in the username field in their database. The website scrubbed emails from that field, and so it submitted a null username. The app didn't l, so it let me log in. Weirdest issue I've ever had with a service and actually figured it out.
Using android banking app, phone broke, new phone with same app flagged and froze my whole account. I had no access to my money and had to physically go to the bank to get it all unlocked, they couldn't do it over the phone. Only had $20 in my wallet and thankfully my cab driver took me there even though the fare was more. Not a fun day.
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Whew yeah that's a shitty one too. Good job working it out!
I'm not a security expert, so I'm sure someone can correct me, but it is my understanding that all the nonsense of adding numbers and special characters does nothing to increase security. Longer passwords increase security, even if they are all lowercase letters.
So, "PaS$w3rD@" is a much less secure password than "sallyandbillywenttothestoreforsoda"
You are exactly right and here is a comic that explains it. But nearly 0 websites have caught on to this.
https://xkcd.com/936/?correct=horse&battery=staple
That's 59 and 159 bits of entropy, respectively according to some random online password entropy calculator I found.
Even better, just type out the whole sentence fully. Why disallow spaces?
"Sally and Billy went to the store for soda". 274 bits.
It's not that it does NOTHING to improve security... An 8-character password with more options per character IS more complex (and in that sense, secure) than one with fewer.
It's just that adding more characters (e.g. in a passphrase, as per your example) also increases complexity, and is more usable.
And it's so weird that almost everyone seems to do it that way. I can't think of a reason other than complacency of a non-golden path interaction.
the rule where it couldn't be more than 12 characters long
This is the one I don't get. Sure you don't want people putting in an infinitely long password, but I like to have my passwords at around 15 characters. Why are you forcing me to make a less secure password?
Only reason I can think of is storage but even at a massive scale, this is text, paying for that storage would cost as much as a rounding error.
It's even worse. If done correctly, the length of the password does not affect the size of the stored value. Because if you're doing it right, you only save the hash of the password. And the length of the hash is fixed.
But they don't (shouldn't) store the actual password. They store a hash of the password, which is the same length regardless of length of the actual password.
There's a type of attack where you put absurdly large inputs into fields that perform expensive calculations, like password hashing... So imagine 100 computers spamming the login form with the whole Bee Movie script 10x per second (which would be a pretty small attack)... Cheap to send, expensive to process. As others mention, the storage should be cheap, because the hashed version of the password is all the same length.
So it makes sense for apps to have SOME upper limit... But it should be like 64 or 100 or 128 or 500 or something. 12 or 16 or 20 is just obnoxious.
My password generator is set to 24 characters. 12 or 15 seems a bit short.
One of our systems at work won't let you use the last thirteen passwords. And it makes you change it monthly.
Yeah, I'm sitting there changing my password 13 times until I can go back to mine. I already do this with our 3 month expiry, but ours only checks against the current password, not a history of old passwords.
Password expiry doesn't make systems more secure, it makes users lazily set insecure passwords to deal with your shitty mind games.
I see your "13 resets in a row" and raise you a "minimum password age".
Hello, Tech Support? Yeah, I can't remember my password... I know, this is the 13th time this week... I'll try real hard to remember this time I promise.
Any organization still doing this is a decade behind best practices. NIST published new recommendations years ago that specified getting rid of the practice of regular forced password resets specifically because they encourage bad practices that make passwords weaker.
Of course it doesn't help that there are some industry compliance standards that have refused to update their requirements, but I don't know of any that would require monthly password changes.
Where specifically could I find this recommendation so i can forward it to my IT department?
What you want is NIST 800-63b https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecret
Specifically sections 5.1.1.1 and 5.1.1.2.
Excerpt from 5.1.1.2 pertaining to complexity and rotation requirements:
Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.
Appendix A of the document contains their reasoning for changing from the previous common wisdom.
The tl;dr of their changes boil down to length is more important than any other factor when it comes to password security.
Edit to add:
In my personal opinion, organizations should be trying to move away from passwords as much as possible. If your IT team seems to think this system is so important that they need to rotate passwords every month, they should probably be transitioning to hardware security tokens, passkeys, or worst case, password with non-sms MFA.
Now I know nothing about the actual circumstances and I know there are plenty of reasons why that may not be possible in this specific case, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention it.
WorkPassword1
WorkPassword2
WorkPassword3….
JanPass.01
AprPass.04
JulPass.07
...
I only have had one coworker that didn't do this stupid incrementation thing (some salt with a bit more than a number based on some logic).
He was the guy that would take a minute or two every time he needed to unlock his computer to open his password manager on his phone and slowly type out a long and difficult to type random password that he could never memorize due to the frequency we had to change passwords.
So many delays during conversations / meetings with this guy.
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PassA, PassB, PassC, etc.
It's a bit of an infuriating story that I had not so long ago.
I have a Playstation account and I recently wanted to log into that account on the PlayStation website. The Password I had saved in my Bitwarden Password Manager was apparently wrong. Okay, then I will just reset it, that's fine.
I went through the Password reset process and generated a new Password, pasted it into the Password field and sent it and everything was fine. I tried to log in with that password and was told that the username or password was wrong. Okay, that is weird, since I reset the password just now the login name couldn't be wrong because, well, I just used that for the reset.
I tried that several times with the same result and gave up.
A few months later, I wanted to try again and had the same problem. I wanted to sort that out so I went through the same process with the Support bot yet again which then told me that I should come back in the "office hours". A company making 84 billion in revenue should be able to employ 24/7 customer service or at least tell me that when I request support and not let me go through the bot again.
So, I waited for the customer service personnel to be available and told them my problem. There I was told that "everything was looking fine on their end" and they quickly ended the support. I mean, yes, I was angry but wasn't abusive to that person because if you couldn't help me what should I do with my account, it also definitely wasn't their specific fault. But I would, at least, have expected more than "Well, works on our end, sucks for you, bye".
The next time I tried again and got a more competent Support dude and we ran through the same troubleshooting steps as before. Reset password (even though I just did that, again, through the bot), logged in again and failed again. This time they suggested that I could use a "normal" password that I don't generate. THAT worked for some reason.
All of my generated passwords in Bitwarden are up to 32 long with all possible characters, depending on what the website allows or expects. If a website, for example, doesn't allow 32 characters, I adjust and shorten it to the maximum length they allow. That worked without issues so far.
Well, turns out that the field that you use to reset your password has a character limit of 30 characters. But, this would be fine if the dialogue tells you that your password is too long, but it doesn't. It just cuts off at 30 characters and happily saves that.
However, the Password field that you use to log in doesn't have that restriction.
This means that you reset your password with a 32-character long generated password, which is saved in your vault, PlayStation saves a 30-long password and then you use the 32-long password to log in, which fails because it isn't the same.
And this isn't even mentioned in the password guidelines. It only said "min 8 characters" but not the maximum.
Sadly more common than one would expect.
I mean I wish you could sue them for that. This is just incompetence on their side.
The short version:
This means that you reset your password with a 32-character long generated password, which is saved in your vault, PlayStation saves a 30-long password and then you use the 32-long password to log in, which fails because it isn’t the same.
That password prompt should be scorched to earth.
Go back to try again, now that you have confirmation the old password was, in fact, correct:
Wrong password
This usually means that your old password expired and the system didnt notify you. Basically, your account is inactive until you set a new password.
Any system I've ever used that expires passwords, forces you to set a new one upon logging in with the expired one.
It doesn't just lock you out and expect you to figure out on your own that you've gotta reset it via the 'forgot your password' link.
Those systems are well designed (save for the part that they're using password expiry)
There are a lot more shitty programmers out there than good ones
Oh, Microsoft Active Directory does this, when you log in via a method that doesn't allow changing the passwords (e.g. VPN login over RADIUS).
That, or the system has a transparent lockout, where if you type your password wrong for e.g. 3 times it'll stop accepting new tries for a specific duration to stop people trying to guess the password. I've run into this type of brute forcing prevention multiple times, though IMO the correct approach would be 2FA coupled with proper passwords instead.
If you've changed your password in the past, some services like Google will keep a history of all of your old passwords and prevent you from changing it back to any password you've previously used, even though only your current password will unlock your account
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I'm trying to avoid this kind of PTSD ok?
I've had this happen on sites as a very shitty way to force users to change their passwords. Instead of simply telling you your PW has expired and you need to change it, the design is to invalidate your current password and leave you frustrated you can't login, so you do a reset. Of course your password was correct, but you can't re-use it. I've found this prevalent on government sites.
When people who should never be in charge of anything are left in charge of everything.
Yes that's for sure what's happening. If I come across an account that does this I delete the account. No point in keeping an account that I need to 're-register' if I sign in once or twice a year.
Can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me.
When the password change screen supports different characters or string length than the login screen that happens. You have to use less secure passwords in that case.
I suspect a lot of the time this comes from the fact that it won't let you use any previously used password.
So it goes like this:
- create account, set password one
- forget password one when trying to log in, quickly reset the pass to get in, setting a new pass in the process
- forget that you reset the password, but remember password one again, so you try to use it
- doesn't work, so you reset the password again, trying to set it to what you thought it was (password one)
- get this error, because while password one is not the current password, it has been used before
It's still funny, because it happened to literally everyone, humans just work that way.
I've been in development enough years that I read this as a company that has had a "security incident" that they're not public about, and have set all accounts to Force Password Change.
I'm actually surprised so many other people run into this. Happens to me all the time but I figure it's because i use a VPN. A lot of sites will automatically lock your account if they consider a login attempt "suspicious"
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