AOL's Embarassing Password Woes

An anonymous reader writes "AOL.com users may think they have up to sixteen characters to use as a password, but they'd be wrong, thanks to this security artifact detailed by The Washington Post's Security Fix blog: "Well, it turns out that when someone signs up for an AOL.com account, the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL's system, however, doesn't read past the first eight characters." This means that a user who uses "password123" or any other obvious eight-character password with random numbers on the end is in effect using just that lame eight-character password."

Comments

DES passwords

[1s44c]

The fact that DES passwords are 8 characters long and anything over the first 8 is silently ignored is well known.

Am I alone here in remembering the old slashdot? It used to be IT stories for IT professionals and hobbyists. Now it's dumbed down stories for help desk wannabes.

Whats next? A story on how the letters look weird with the caps lock on?

Re:Not alone

[Joebert]

You're all fired, we're switching back to Microsoft.
There, problem solved.