Basic cyber security says that passwords should be encrypted and hashed, so that even the company storing them doesn’t know what the password is. (When you log in, the site performs the same encrypting and hashing steps and compares the results) Otherwise if they are hacked, the attackers get access to all the passwords.
I’ve noticed a few companies ask for specific characters of my password to prove who I am (eg enter the 2nd and 9th character)
Is there any secure way that this could be happening? Or are the companies storing my password in plain text?
They what?!
This is a huge red flag and should not even be possible for your primary password, if they are following basic security principles. Are you sure this isn’t a secondary PIN or something like that?
NatWest in the Uk does it for both the password and the pin, has been since I signed up like 10 years ago. I assumed they do it so you don’t enter a full password that someone could access later. No idea how they work out but they are big and I assume if it was insecure they’d have had issues by now. I assume they store the letter groupings in advance.
At this point, it’s okay to assume that they have had issues and they haven’t disclosed them.
Can a company be sued for storing pw in plaintext?
I’m not sure if they can be sued for that. Surely you can sue them if they get hacked and you’re negatively affected, though.
So i get the feeling that storing pw in plaintext is heavily frowned upon but not illegal
Not ilegal. Just very stupid. Like it’s not illegal to leave your house’s front door unlocked.
I would assume they have the whole password in plain text, then. Not much you can do about it, just make sure you’re not re-using any part of that password for other services. And if you are, then you should start changing them all to something unique, ideally with a password manager like Keepass or BitWarden. This is a good habit anyway, because you can never really know how companies are handling their IT security.
Crazy that that hasn’t become an issue for them yet! Thanks for the tips! I used to be pretty bad with my passwords but I’m reformed and using KeePass for everything these days.
One of the greats back on r/TalesFromTechSupport had a story about how his company (a telco, iirc) did the following with passwords:
A user could have a password that they thought was “štr0ng&longsupermegapasswordofdoom” and be able to log in with it, but what was stored was “0tr0ng0l” and they would have been able to log in with something like “!tröng$lips” as well.ä
None of this was communicated to the customers.
Obviously, once in a while a customer would call support because they were sure they had made a mistake entering their password but were able to log in anyway. And tech support had strict instructions to gaslight those customers that they must have entered the password correctly and just thought they made a mistake.
Hot damn 🙈