Most Secure Online Bank? I Think Not! —
I don’t get my bank. On their homepage they claim to be ‘the UK’s most secure online bank’ yet, they limit customers to using details that can effectively be cracked in no time at all. They insist that you use a all numerical 12 digit ‘customer id’ to login and a five digit ‘pin’.
FIVE DIGITS for a password? That’s utterly ridiculous! From a security standpoint, people should be generating passwords using letters, numbers and non-alphanumeric characters and really at a length of at LEAST 6 characters long.
Personally I use 8 character passwords for non-important things like forums etc and a much more secure 13 character password for important things (such as root access on my home computer). If I had a choice my internet banking would be among the ‘important’ password choices.
This is the point where I name and shame the bank that force their customers to use a password that could theoretically be cracked in just a few minutes using any modern computer – ALLIANCE & LEICESTER
If you value your privacy and are a frequent user of online banking, do not use alliance and leicester. Once I’ve got my finances in order, I’ll be transferring to another bank, and I’ll be choosing a bank that give a shit about basic security precautions.
Categorised as: Geeky
How long have you been with them? Have you ever actually logged in? I’m a customer and there’s much more to their security than just the 12 digit ID and the 5 digit PIN. In fact they have more security than another bank I deal with. Plus to get the right combination of 12 digit ID and 5 digit PIN would take a lot of tries, and you’d be locked out after 3 goes, and that’s BEFORE you get to the two way authentication or to transactions that require a further password.
I’ve been with A&L for over ten years and I’ve been using the online banking for over two years. I’ve never used any other online banking system but that doesn’t mean that a five digit pin is acceptable.
In all honesty, I’ve never had my account locked for getting the password wrong (it’s not exactly hard to remember a five digit PIN is it?). Of course, your right that it would take a lot of attempts using a random number generator but I would still rather that they didn’t limit me to such a simple password.
Barclays is quite good!
You have to enter your surname and unique customer ID. Then it goes through to the next stage where you have to enter your 5 digit pin and 2 specfic characters from your password (which is 8 characters max/min). If you get it wrong more than 3 times you are temporarily blocked whilst a new login comes through the post!
I’m very tight on security, but you’ve got to have money to steal in the first place and lets face it, I’m not worth the bother!!!
Lol… that’s SO true.
It sounds like Barclays is more secure than A&L just by requiring more information to login… So does that mean that A&L are telling porkies?