11–20 of 127 posts
Banks aren't technology companies. Someday a technology company will become a bank.
The banking system functions largely on the choice, application and integration of technology, and banking is more of a technology business than just about any other. And let's be fair here - Schwab is not a bank, and even among investment firms is an outlier with the noted bad practices.
Thanks for posting, I've passed this on to my contact at Schwab to see if it can get fixed properly ;)
Sadly, I expect it will change only if there was some embarrassing large scale attack that is subsequently publicized.
They let you choose a random user id, as in, change the user id whenever you want. I bet you the security guys over at Schwab are using that as a reason to not improve password options. I can see the argument being - "The idiotic password limitations are not a big deal because of the random userids".
I did report this a while ago to Schwab both over the phone and on Twitter and I have been equally ignores. Thanks for writing a blog post about it. Edit: forgot to mention that the passwords are case insensitive!!!!!!
Banks aren't technology companies. Someday a technology company will become a bank.
I have called and complained many times about their password policies. They let you choose a random user id, as in, change the user id whenever you want. I bet you the security guys over at Schwab are using that as a reason to not improve password options. I can see the argument being - "The idiotic password limitations are not a big deal because of the random userids".
This sounds like a symptom of the multilayered bureaucracy that often goes on in banks and similar institutions - a change to the UI to add something as simple as an extra field for the token code, and the changes required to hook it up to the backend, might have been accompanied by so much "enterprisey" management red-tape cruft (specification writing, approval documents, approval meetings, meetings for scheduling meetings - I wish I was joking, etc.) that it made the programmers find creative ways around the system.
At the least, if I were forced to concatenate fields, I'd use a separator that couldn't occur in either one, like a comma or something else that their password policy didn't allow... but then again, I wouldn't be surprised if something else in their system would reject that.
Thanks for posting, I've passed this on to my contact at Schwab to see if it can get fixed properly ;)
I would be even more disheartened if customer complaints and an article in Ars can't get this fixed, but someone "passing it on to a contact" could. It's disgusting that this is how they've handled it. I minimize how much money I keep with them and will be closing the account when I get back to the States.
Schwab's standard response was 1) to assure me that they had "intelligent" fraud monitoring systems on their backend and 2) to offer me a hard token, which would have been a pain and may have caused issues with Mint.