Category: Odd + Funny, Technology Author : JR Posted: August 28, 2008
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Using “Pants” In Your Password Can Backfire


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Slyly insulting your bank with the word “pants” can have its consequences.

Sound crazy? Check it out: A British bank customer says he wasn’t pleased with his bank, Lloyd’s TSB, so he changed his banking password to “Lloyds is pants.” Brilliant insult, if I don’t say so myself.

But things only get funnier from there. The guy says he soon discovered a bank staff member had changed the password — to “no it’s not.”

So our fella, of course, tried to change it again. This time he opted to go with “Barclays is better,” referring to a competing British bank. He says, though, the system wouldn’t let him; he had mysteriously been locked out of changing the password at all. And when he called the bank, he says they wouldn’t let him change it back to “Lloyds is pants,” either — because they thought it was inappropriate.

“I asked if it was ‘pants’ they didn’t like, and would ‘Lloyds is rubbish’ do? But they didn’t think so,” he told the BBC.

Our saucy lad asked if he could change it to “censorship,” but the bank shot that one down too.

The bank has since apologized and says the employee who made the initial change no longer works there.

What a load of pants.


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  • Lloyd's stores passwords unencrypted? It shouldn't be *possible* for a bank employee to know what your password is. If any random employee can obtain the users' login credentials, you money is not safe there.

    Reason enough by itself to take your business elsewhere, even apart from the lack of a sense of humor.

    That, or the story is false.
  • hypocentre
    I think you'll find that 'pants' are undergarments in Britain. The picture is of what we would call trousers.
  • So.. a bank stores passwords in cleartext.. ?
  • what a load of pants!
  • Malvolio
    It's a serious security hole to store the password at all. I won't go into the technical details of verifying an offered password without the original to compare it against, but it isn't difficult and keeps you from getting into all sorts of trouble. If Lloyds isn't up to this simple technique (which was developed in the mid-1960s), they ARE pants.
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