Not only does the credit bureau max out their password length, you have a small list of available non-alphanumeric characters you can use, and no spaces. Also you cannot used a plused email address, and it had an issue with my self hosted email alias, forcing me to use my gmail address.
Both Experian and transunion had no password length limitations, nor did they require my username be my email address.
Update: I have been unable to log into my account for the last 3 days now. Every time I try I get a page saying to call customer service. After a total of 2 hours on hold I finally found the issue, you cannot connect to Equifax using a VPN. In addition there is no option for 2FA (not even email or sms) and they will hang up on you if you push the issue of their security being lax. Their reasoning for lax security and no vpn usage is “well all of our other customers are okay with this”.
Financial companies ans banks and stuff have to follow regulations on their MFA method. That why you can’t just use any OTP authenticator and are stuck with email/SMS.
In case anybody’s curious about what those are:
The biggest reason they use phone calls or SMS, however, is because they don’t want to go to the hassle of getting an in-house MFA service (a TOTP backend, in other words), approved, pen tested, analyzed, verified… all things considered, it’s faster and easier to go with a service like Twilio that already did all that legwork. A couple of years back I worked for a company in just that position, and after we did all the legwork, research, and consultation with the independent third party specialists trying to run our own TOTP would have easily doubled the yearly cost because of all the compliance stuff.
Adding TOTP would be cheaper in the long run than continuing to pay those SMS rates. I dont think its about any kind of extra hassle they have to deal with. More of terrible NIST standards written by the center for internet security, which is a for profit corporation that apparently nist allows to write all their standards
It really depends on the company. When I was working for that company a few jobs back, we crunched the numbers and the cost of C&C and IV&V (Certification and Accreditation; Independent Verification and Validation) for an in-house TOTP had one more zero to the left of the decimal point than the Twilio bill (added up for the year). Plus, for compliance we’d have to get everything re-vetted yearly.
That’s kinda of the definition of government contracting. :) I think the only US government org that has actual govvies doing anything other than management is NASA.
Yeah except you only have to spend the money once as opposed to paying twilio every year