It is truly upsetting to see how few people use password managers. I have witnessed people who always use the same password (and even tell me what it is), people who try to login to accounts but constantly can’t remember which credentials they used, people who store all of their passwords on a text file on their desktop, people who use a password manager but store the master password on Discord, entire tech sectors in companies locked to LastPass, and so much more. One person even told me they were upset that websites wouldn’t tell you password requirements after you create your account, and so they screenshot the requirements every time so they could remember which characters to add to their reused password.
Use a password manager. Whatever solution you think you can come up with is most likely not secure. Computers store a lot of temporary files in places you might not even know how to check, so don’t just stick it in a text file. Use a properly made password manager, such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC. They’re not going to steal your passwords. Store your master password in a safe place or use a passphrase that you can remember. Even using your browser’s password storage is better than nothing. Don’t reuse passwords, use long randomly generated ones.
It’s free, it’s convenient, it takes a few minutes to set up, and its a massive boost in security. No needing to remember passwords. No needing to come up with new passwords. No manually typing passwords. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but if even one of you decides to use a password manager after this then it’s an easy win.
Please, don’t wait. If you aren’t using a password manager right now, take a few minutes. You’ll thank yourself later.
To be fair, that is super fucking annoying. I hate when I tell bitwarden to save my password only to have the site come back with it being too long and only some special characters are allowed.
My favorite is the sites that silently truncate your password to a maximum length only they know, before storing it. Then when you come back you have to guess which substring of your password they actually used before you can log in. Resetting doesn’t help unless you realize they’re doing this and use a short one.
My favorite was the password set screen allowing up to 64 characters, but login fails if the password is over 32 chars.
My webhost allows passwords of all length and complexities in the password set field, but will strip $ and & on the login mask on their main website, like in the top right corner.
A failed login will automatically bring you to a dedicated login.xxx.yyy subdomain and prompt a password reset, but if you use the login mask there instead, the exact same password works.
Login and password set/reset forms being out of sync is a classic. 😆
I haven’t seen that one in a while luckily.
I like the password in my thinkpad’s bios that’s case sensitive when entering it to log in, but setting the password it’s not. That took me a while to figure out.
Omfg, one of my banks did this to me and was infuriating. I was able to call in to fix it and made a bug report, but goddamn, what idiot silently truncates the sign up password but not also the login form?!?
Similarly, sites that don’t handle backslashes properly. I’ve had a few where I had to use my password sans all the backslashes because it interpreted them as an escape character.
https://max.levch.in/post/724289457144070144/shamir-secret-sharing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzescXc5SW0
That sounds too completely absurd to be real, which is why I believe it. Yikes.
Reddit used to silently truncate passwords. I can’t log in to my original account because they “fixed” the issue at some point
Clarification: They reuse the same password (such as “Password”) and whenever they create an account they have to add special characters (like “Password1&” if numbers and #@&%$ were required) and when they login they forget which special characters were required by that service, meaning they don’t know which special characters to append to their generic password to successfully login. The solution was to screenshot every password requirement for every service and still try to remember which characters were used.
But yes, there is an unrelated frustration where password requirements aren’t presented upfront.
And pinnacle of this frustration is “password too long”… Talk about security
which doesn’t make sense as a requirement, as the passwords themselves are not even (supposed to be) stored
limits of 128+ characters? Sure.
Limits of 30, 20, 18, or 16 as I’ve seen in many places? I suddenly don’t trust your website.
Do you want to know the kicker? There are banks (yes, you heard me right) that straight up don’t allow more than 20 chars. 20!!! And they say you got to use the app for X things because it’s secure and shit (e.g.: use the app to 2FA credit card transactions). Meanwhile, does not allow you to add a yubikey for Fido authentication
Steam and Spotify are notorious for this.
True but doesn’t a new password then prompt bitwarden for you to update the credentials ?