Recently a family member’s credit card had been compromised, so I thought it high-time that I update my personal online banking password. That’s when I encountered a certain French-Canadian bank’s impenetrable password scheme:
Password must be 6 numbers and/or letters in length. All I can say is they just made my brute-forcer exponentially faster.









May 3rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm
GG gotta love bank security
May 6th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
You’ll love my passwords. I string ‘em together in various combinations from a memorized list of 8-9 individual passwords I use for a year. I won’t say how long the passwords as they vary (or do they?) but minimal size is roughly 12 per password string.
Example:
a23(2Ln^eI
74nYj9@c45
i0!oCz7hje
Becomes:
a23(2Ln^eI74nYj9@c45i0!oCz7hje <– Paypal/bank/whatever
Then all I need to memorize the password combinations for specific sites further is via three to varying length combinations of the first character in the pass.
So this example would be, a7i
It’s simple in practice, all it requires is muscle memory.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I actually have a similar password scheme, albeit slightly less complex. But I do end up having a different password for every login.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
In my humble opinion, it’s far more important to check for software, hardware and shoulder surfers than it is to have a super complex password. Although, obviously your password shouldn’t be the name of your dog, mother’s maiden-name or anything asinine like that. Heck, the security questions for most services/banks/etc are garbage. Unless you can set the password to something _noone_ else knows, it’s useless. How easy is it for some maligned creature lurking out on the internet to find out your mothers maiden-name or the year you were born.