It's even better than that, to login to the tangerine website, you first enter you're username, and it returns back a picture and phrase you pre-select, before entering you're pin.
When showing you the picture and phrase:
>Important: If you don't recognize or see your picture and phrase, don't enter your PIN. First check that you entered the correct information. If you're still unsure, call 1-888-SAFE(7233)-304.
Anyone care to guess my username, and steal my picture and phrase?
As I recall from opening my account in the 90's the photo feature was always there. It was "forward thinking" at the time, but I can't say they have kept up that pace.
A little bird told me it's because they still use cobol fixed width data and are basically scared to change it. To fix, first they have to finish their rewrite.
Sometimes people resist fixing serious issues with a legacy system, because rewriting the legacy system is seen as preferable to evolving it. But, the rewrite always takes a lot longer than you expect, which can result in a lengthy period in which those issues continue to bite you. Just hire a few good mainframe COBOL programmers (they still exist) and fix the serious issues in the legacy system.
Changing a legacy mainframe COBOL system shouldn't be scary. Provided you have qualified staff and the right tools (such as COBOL static analysis tools), it is not inherently more risky than changing a Java or .Net app.
What I don’t get is that tangerine was originally ING Direct. Which was a new bank that just started in Canada toward the end of 90s or early 2000s. How did they end up with a COBOL system?
6 character limit was already there during ING Direct years. Possible they were using the old Dutch systems but i find it a tad surprising, they would have needed to set it up from scratch in Canada (as I don’t think anything was stored in Netherlands). So they purposely setup an old-ass system in the 90s. What a shit show
Ouch... It saddens me when rewrites are not taken as seriously as they should be... Instead they rather risk people's personal information and finances.
Dollar to a donut there is a machine with IBM on it backing this up. At a prior life the ultimate reason why "you can type as many characters as you want but only the first 8 matter" came down to passing the login auth to a mainframe which only took 8 characters. Yes in EBCDIC, glad I never had to actually interface with them much, except for having to deploy ftps (ftp with ssl encryption, its an abomination, all due to no sftp on the mainframe at the time).
Not a 'good idea', but it's partly because the same password is used for telephone banking. And people seem to have trouble with typing long passwords on numerical keypads.
I understand that, but I'm looking for something more specific... Hashes aren't length-limited by design; I suppose storage size or database limitations could be an issue, but a 6-character password in ASCII with 1 million users is 6 megabytes.
If you are RACF-defined, you must enter the password defined in the RACF® data set as the value for password. The new password specifies the password that is to replace the current password. new_password must be separated from password by a slash(/) and, optionally, one or more standard delimiters (tab, blank, or comma). new_password is 1 to 8 alphanumeric characters long. This operand is ignored for non-RACF defined users. (Printing is suppressed for some types of terminals when you respond to a prompt for a password.)
With z/OS® V1R7 or later, the password and new_password can be in mixed case, if your installation has enabled RACF mixed case password support.
Some of these systems originate from the era when a 5mb hard drive was an incredible amount of space, even at enterprise level. They pre-date personal computing.
Do the other banks still have the same limitations at their root, but just take a numeric hash of whatever you enter, compare against a 6 digit integer and pray you don't find a collision?
It's actually worse than that. It's fixed 4-digit or 6-digit. Most customers probably use the same 4-digit password for online/telephone banking as they use for their debit card's PIN. I don't care what legacy software the backend is built with; a 4-digit or 6-digit numerical password should frankly be an illegal way for a bank to do business.
