Password Length matters

Password Length Matters is the title of this somewhat long story.

What started as my daughter in law asking about my membership at a store, turned into finding out that the length of passwords matters.  To see if the card had expired I needed to login to the companies domain, and every time I tried it failed, so I did the ‘Forgot Password’ prompt, and reset the password according to that dialogue it was accepted, then tried to login again, and got the prompt that my email or password was not acceptable.

That frustration caused my to call for support and after over 2 minutes of robots finally got a human.   She had me try Chrome browser, flush the cache, and all sorts of things up to deleting the account, that didn’t happen, the login reported that I needed a special character, I had one already but in the ‘too long’ part of the password.

The length had to be 16 characters maximum, then it worked fine, ergo Password length matters.

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Make your password long. 12-14 characters are recommended. Use a mix of characters like capitalization, symbols and numbers. Use a different password for every account.  from Georgetown University Information Security Office