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Yet more passwords
I cannot now buy a train ticket online without having to register my debit card with a new validation scheme from Visa. Of course, allowing me to use my pin number as the password would be too rational and easy.
It has to be a mixed alphanumberic string at least six characters long.
And I had a letter in the post today from Alliance and Leicester business banking (whose online system is so secure that I get logged out every other time I use it because I've typed in a password character incorrectly while trying to recall if 7 is the 6th digit or the 7th one of my magic number) THey're going to be adding an extra level of security. Extra? I already have to put in a company ID, a log on ID, and not one, but two, long complicated passwords.
Aaargh!
It has to be a mixed alphanumberic string at least six characters long.
And I had a letter in the post today from Alliance and Leicester business banking (whose online system is so secure that I get logged out every other time I use it because I've typed in a password character incorrectly while trying to recall if 7 is the 6th digit or the 7th one of my magic number) THey're going to be adding an extra level of security. Extra? I already have to put in a company ID, a log on ID, and not one, but two, long complicated passwords.
Aaargh!
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And the magic number thing is so that someone who is covertly running a keylogger on your machine can't log into your account -- it'll probably ask for a different digit, and they won't have it because you haven't typed it.
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The basic problem is that the more passwords I have, the more I have to write them down - and that's a bigger risk than occasional duplication.
I'm running out of mnemonics that won't mean anything to other people.
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Well I'm afraid we customers have to put up with this sort of thing with the increasing levels of identity theft prevalent these days. It's irritating, but it's a necessary price we pay in return for the freedom to have bank employees leaving laptops full of our personal and account information lying around on buses or trains. Or something like that.
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Natwest haven't got much else right, but their online banking systems is easy to use with effective yet unobtrusive security.
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And actually, writing passwords down on a piece of paper is not a particularly bad idea, as 99.999% of black-hats won't be able to get access to it. Don't put them in a text file, though.
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Having said that, I'm afraid I have in the past been guilty of issuing alphanumeric case sensitve hexadecimal passwords to work colloues who have *really* irritated me enough to deserve it.
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That being said, my bank doesn't use passwords, I have to put my card and my pin number in a small calculator (which they oh so cutely call a numculator) and then enter a number that is shown on screen which changes every time. The resulting number on the numculator has to be entered on the screen again and that's enough to get me logged in. I have to repeat it when I want to transfer money. Easy enough to be usable, and as far as I can judge still safe enough for everyday use. And I do use windows.
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I can remember the nth letter from a word much more easily than the nth digit from a number. I think my brain confuses the position with the actual digit.
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I use two different Internet banking systems, and they both have acceptable security solutions (one uses a separate code box, another a client cert and a special Java plugin). I still wouldn't dream of using either from a Windows machine...
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As it happened not hard to get a secured page but annoying