it's very important when you're storing passwords in plain text, so typically it's a sign the website is dangerously insecure, though sometimes it's also just some product manager going "well everyone else does it, so it must be important".
That said, I did actually run into an instance where having ";-- in your password would trigger the WAF during login and because we needed to ship ASAP the easiest way to get around that was to ban ; in passwords. I don't think we ever went back to fix that one...
> it's very important when you're storing passwords in plain text, so typically it's a sign the website is dangerously insecure ...
This is a misconception. Password length is far more important than allowing a few "tricky" non-alphanumerics. It aids entropy, but it's not some security silver bullet. Also, if the web service you're using is storing undigested passwords then all bets are off.
Comments
it's very important when you're storing passwords in plain text, so typically it's a sign the website is dangerously insecure, though sometimes it's also just some product manager going "well everyone else does it, so it must be important".
That said, I did actually run into an instance where having ";-- in your password would trigger the WAF during login and because we needed to ship ASAP the easiest way to get around that was to ban ; in passwords. I don't think we ever went back to fix that one...
> it's very important when you're storing passwords in plain text, so typically it's a sign the website is dangerously insecure ...
This is a misconception. Password length is far more important than allowing a few "tricky" non-alphanumerics. It aids entropy, but it's not some security silver bullet. Also, if the web service you're using is storing undigested passwords then all bets are off.