Amex: Make Your Passwords Secure, Just Not Too Secure
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6 Comments
J
Oddly, banks and credit card companies seems to be the worst offenders of these terrible password policies. I cancelled one bank account (TCF) because of their terrible password policy.
T
Terry Schmitt
These are also the folks that limit an address line to 20 characters during an address change. Oops!
J
PCMag ran a story including a response from AMEX about their ridiculous password policy:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358985,00.asp
From the article:
"We discourage the use of special characters because hacking softwares can recognize them very easily.
The length of the password is limited to 8 characters to reduce keyboard contact. Some softwares can decipher a password based on the information of "most common keys pressed".
Therefore, lesser keys punched in a given frame of time lessen the possibility of the password being cracked."
Who knew? I've since changed all my passwords to 'qwerty'!
K
It's surprising because their website is very modern, with lots of cool AJAX and Flash, but this policy is obviously out of date.
T
and passwords are case-insensitive. Easily the worst password policy of all financial related accounts I have.
G
Well... if they are too secure it takes the government too long to crack them ...
(Article: The government has all the keys ... summary title). The gov't keys really doesn't matter, banks scan for odd activity and report anyway!