this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
83 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35258 readers
1697 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Basic cyber security says that passwords should be encrypted and hashed, so that even the company storing them doesn't know what the password is. (When you log in, the site performs the same encrypting and hashing steps and compares the results) Otherwise if they are hacked, the attackers get access to all the passwords.

I've noticed a few companies ask for specific characters of my password to prove who I am (eg enter the 2nd and 9th character)

Is there any secure way that this could be happening? Or are the companies storing my password in plain text?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve only seen this as a second factor after entering a full password. Although it has mostly been replaced by actual 2FA now. Last time I remember this type was on the uk gov student finance website

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The 2 occasions I can think of, it was characters from my main password. Both were during contact with the Support teams. I no longer have service with either of the companies (due to unrelated reasons)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did you have to give those characters directly to the support staff?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On one occasion, yes, over the phone.

The other I was in a web chat on the company's website and they provided a link to a page on the same website where it asked for the characters

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Even if they somehow manage to secure the password properly while still being able to know a specific character from that password, having support staff handle that information directly seems very very fishy. All in all, it doesn’t speak for their security practices. Even if they have sone form of protection for the specific characters stored separately, it would reduce the overall security because parts of your passwords are more easily guessable. In the worst case they simple store your pw in plain text and on top of that they might supply that information to the support staff.