Dumb Password Rules

Shaming sites with dumb password rules.

Contributing

Feel free to submit a pull request with dumb rules you've encountered.

See other sites for the formatting and follow these rules:

  • Include the name of the site with a link.
  • Add a clean comment about the dumb password rule (optional).
  • Include at least one screenshot.
  • Keep the sites in alphabetical order.

Sites

Table of contents

Admiral

Restrict the inclusion of a % character.

Admiral

ADP

Forced to change the password during the first login. At least they could use proper grammar in their rule list.

ADP

Advanzia

  • Requires at least 6 to a maximum of 12 characters [sic!]
  • Allows only digits and letters without umlauts
  • Allows only specific special characters: ? ! $ €% & * _ = - +. ,:; / () {} [] ~ @ #
  • Allows no spaces

Advanzia

American Express

Sometimes I forget that caps-lock is on, glad it doesn't matter.

American Express

AmeriHealth

Their site says "All information is kept safe and secure." Just not as secure as you'd like.

User Password must be between 6 and 14 characters and contain 1 numerical value.

AmeriHealth

AOL

Between 8 and 16, so I can't go up to 20. Oh, and thanks for restricting one of the most common special characters!

AOL

Arlo

Your password contains characters not listed. Therefore, they do not match.

Arlo

Banco Mercantil

8 to 15 chars. No special chars allowed but requires special chars. Also requires lowercase, uppercase, and numbers. Consecutive chars are prohibited. Did I mention the page hangs while you type? That eye icon tho.

Banco Mercantil

Battle.net

8 to 16 characters, at least one number and one letter and last but not least NO special characters, and can't have a password that looks like your username too.

A real time travel adventure through the password rules of 2005!

Battle.net

Best Buy

You can enter whatever password you like! But you probably don't want to make it too long, because you'll break us and you'll never be able to login again.

Best Buy
Best Buy2

Blacknight / Odin

The auto-generated strong password is not a valid password !
Blacknight use Odin for it's admin panel.
Blacknight
Blacknight2

Blackrock

They force you to enter a password that has 8, 9, or 10 characters, then they lecture you on how to create a strong password.

Blackrock

Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts

16 maximum and no special characters. Protecting your US healthcare information.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts

BMO Bank of Montreal

Password must be exactly 6 characters long and no special character.

BMO Bank of Montreal

BMW ConnectedDrive

Although the prompt suggests good things, after many failed attempts to set a new password, it turns out you can ONLY use the special characters shown in the prompt

BMW ConnectedDrive

California Department of Motor Vehicles

They also prohibit pasting into the password field by using a JavaScript alert() whenever you right-click or press the Ctrl button, so you can't use a password manager.

California DMV

Chase Bank

We don't even want you to login online.

Chase Bank

Comcast

Your password should be difficult to guess as long as it's not over 16 characters long.

Comcast

Copyright.gov

I wonder if they cooperate with NSA to enforce the password rules.

Copyright.gov

Dell

Okay at least 6, that's alright i guess. Oh at least one number and one letter, bit dumb but hey not that dumb.

But hiding the fact that it has a max of 20, now THAT is dumb!

Dell

Delta

It's a good thing they don't store personal information such as your passport number... oh wait.

Delta

DJI

The symbol \ is banned without a notice, it'll probably escape whatever you'll put in, just why...

DJI

Dutch Tax Authorities (Belastingdienst)

At least 8 and at most 25 characters, of which at least 3 of the characters were not used in the previous password. No more than 3 of the same characters. At least 1 upper case and 4 lower case characters. No more than 3 special characters.

It's not like hashing passwords is a thing or something.

Dutch Tax Authorities

El Corte Ingles

Min 6 and max 8 characters for password! Can't contain anything different than letters and numbers. Apart, the email address must have at least 8 characters (sorry million dollar domain owners! :D)

El Corte Ingles

E-learning (Unipd)

Exactly 8 characters for password! There must be at least 1 lowercase letter, at least 1 uppercase letter, at least 1 number and at least 1 special char ( * , . $ # @ etc...).

e-learning (Unipd)

Fidelity

No more than 20 characters and leave out characters commonly used by programmers. We don't want you to hack the mainframe.

Fidelity

Global Entry

"Our duties are wide-ranging, and our goal is clear - keeping America safe."

Global Entry

GoDaddy

Some characters are too special.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy SFTP

Max 14 characters for the most important password in your shared hosting environment.

GoDaddy SFTP

Her Majestys Revenue & Customs (UK Tax)

We store basically all of your data, but we can't store your password.

Her Majestys Revenue & Customs

ING a dutch bank in almost 50 countries

Max 20 characters, must have one number, one upper case character and one lower case character. You can only use certain special characters. When i asked about it they answer that it's really hard to change it. When i asked if the password is saved as a hash or just plain they send the answer to the technical department this was march 2018.

ING Bank

Intel

Intel

Izly by Crous

Izly by Crous is an imposed French payment service for the university. You can't pay your daily meal without that because yeah you know cash is an ancient dumb thing.

Your username is firstname.lastname@youruniversity.fr or your phone number. We only allow you a fixed 6 numbers password. Oh yeah we also block your account after three failed atempts. How convenient when the only thing you need to know is the name of someone and where they study. How convenient indeed.

Oh and also look we got pages NOT TRANSLATED IN FRENCH because duh.

Izly by Crous

Jitterbit

While not the dumbest password rule, still dumb.

Password must have a length of at least eight characters and contain at least one: number, special char !#$%-_=+<>, capital letter, and lowercase letter.

Jitterbit

Maxpreps

Natalie Weiner
can't sign in because her's lastname is offensive language for the website

Maxpreps

Merrill Lynch

Passwords must be between 8 and 20 characters, and some special characters are allowed. Users with randomly-generated passwords may find it particularly annoying to generate a password that works for their password safe.

Merrill Lynch

Major League Baseball

When creating a new account they enforce some password rules like: length must be between 8 and 15 characters and there must be one upper case, one lower case letter and one number.

MetLife

MetLife

Max length of 20 characters, no special characters allowed. Pasting into the second password field is disabled even with the Chrome extension Don't Fuck With Paste.

MLB

Microsoft (work accounts)

What doesn't seem to be a problem for personal accounts, is for work accounts from Microsoft (e.g. Office 365 etc.).

Maximum 16 characters. So forget about using your new fancy diceware password here - or really any secure passwords in general.

Oh - and besides that, please don't use any "exotic" symbols, like ¤ or €. Or the letters Æ, Ø or Å from the Danish alphabet. They all are supposedly "spaces".

Microsoft (work accounts)

Mindware

You "may use special characters", but only some of them - and we won't necessarily tell you which ones.

Mindware
Mindware

MKB NetBankár

It only accepts lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numbers (any other character counts as forbidden character).
Also, if your password contains any invalid character, it will get marked as "Identical to the former 10 passwords".
To make it more fun, during the registration, it allows to set a 24 characters password to login to their website.
Once you try to login with the password, it will say that the maximum length accepted is 16 characters.
What actually happens, is that they let you insert 24 characters during registration, but only the first 16 will get actually used as password.

MKB NetBankár

Movistar

Min 7 and max 8 characters for password! Also to be different than the username: the user name is automatically generated and is based on the surname of the user with some characters replaced by digits :)

Has been that way for more than 10 years.

Movistar

Oracle

Should not or must not? RFC 2119 may want a word with you.

Oracle

PayPal

We'll tell you not to use your name as your password, but we won't tell you how we restrict your password choice otherwise.

PayPal

Paytm

Password must be between 5 and 15 characters. Also, spaces don't count as characters.

Paytm

Raiffeisen Bank Serbia

There are a couple of password limitations when creating a new account on Raiffeisen Bank Serbia on-line banking portal. Password length is limited to minimum 8 and maximum 16 characters. Also, minimum uppercase letters 1, minimum lowercase letter 1, minimum digits 2, maximum consecutive identical characters 4 and first character must be a letter. Oh... And, no special characters!

Raiffeisen Bank Serbia

Red Hat

Symbols. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Red Hat

SAP Cloud Appliance Library

Passwords between 8 and 9 characters are the best.

SAP Cloud Appliance Library

Safeway

Passwords limited to 8-12 characters.

Safeway

Singapore Airlines

/\d{6}/

Singapore Airlines

Sparkasse

„Sparkasse“ is a group of banks which is pretty popular in Germany. It calls its passwords „PIN“ („persönliche Identifikations-Nummer“ — personal identification number), the rules are pretty horrific and its not even a number, even though it is called as such! Here is a screenshot from the branch where I am from (Jena, Germany), but since they have a central IT, I think it will be identical in other branches:

Sparkasse Jena

The rules are as such:

  • Only 5 characters
  • Small letters (a-z)
  • Large letters (A-Z)
  • Numbers (0-9)
  • „Special“ characters: ä,ö,ü,Ä,Ö,Ü and ß (Not suprising for a german Company)

After the rules there some hints on how the password should not look like:

  • Combinations of your initials and the birthyear
  • Your phone number or parts thereof
  • Your zipcode
  • Commom combinations like 123ab or 55555
  • Full or parts of your login credentials

Sprint

Sprint "upgraded" their security and disallow special characters.

Sprint

State Bank of India (Foreign Travel Card)

State Bank of India is the largest government operated bank in India. They offer "travel" prepaid cards for foreign currencies, this is for their portal for the prepaid card users to manage their account.

Your password must:

  • Be between 8 and 9 characters long
  • Contain at least 1 lowercase character
  • Contain at least 1 uppercase character
  • Contain at least 1 special character
  • Contain at least 1 number
  • NOT contain any "hacking characters" - #, %, &, =, /, <

SBI

Synchrony Financial

Financial services - where we don't allow you to create the strongest password possible.

Synchrony Financial

Ticketmaster.de

Your password length is limited between 5 and 20 characters.

Ticketmaster.de

TwinSpires

You can gamble on our site. We'll keep your money secure with a 12 character password!

TwinSpires

Ubisoft

Only tells you the rules after submitting and clicking a link to a pop up window.

Ubisoft

United States Postal Service

Pick from an arbitrary list of symbols, and no repeating characters.

United States Postal Service

University of Texas at Austin

Because of the last two rules, which ban dictionary words and any variants using symbol substitutions, neither of the passwords presented in the xkcd comic are allowed.

University of Texas as Austin

Virgin Media

Your password needs to be between 8 and 10 characters long, with no spaces, and must contain only numbers and letters. The first character must be a letter.

Virgin Media

Virgin Mobile

You can only use PIN as your password.

Virgin Mobile

Virgin Trains

Your password needs to be between 8 and 10 characters long. Previously this would silently truncate the password without warning, causing confusion when the password wouldn't work.

Virgin Trains

Walmart

Your password length is limited between 6 and 12 characters.

Walmart

WeatherBug

Maximum 16 characters.

WeatherBug

Wells Fargo

Your password must be between 6 and 14 characters.

Wells Fargo

Williams-Sonoma

25 maximum characters and disallowing some specials.

Williams-Sonoma

Wells Fargo Identity Theft Protection

Your password on an Identity Theft Protection service is limited to between 8 and 20 characters. Your username is allowed to be longer than your password.

Wells Fargo Identity Theft Protection