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Comment by chrismcb | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the more secure you need your data to be, the worse their password restrictions are. Restrictions such as no special characters, or an arbitrary short length raises a red flag. It says they don't really know what they are doing, and it makes me wonder what else is broken.

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And no SQL keywords allowed in passwords. Because they like to advertise that they don't bother escaping user input before concatenating sql strings to store plain text passwords in the database.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13738141/blacklist-filter...

I'd bet that patterns like

    $db->execute("INSERT INTO USERACCOUNTS ('username','password') VALUES ('".$_POST['username']."','".$_POST['password']."')");

are more common than anyone wants to believe.

The PHP manual pages are full of user comments with helpful suggestions just like that, which incompetent programmers copy and paste into production systems. But I think of it as a good thing, an instance of evolution in action, because banks that hire such stupid programmers deserve to have all their money stolen from them.

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