Are these banks secure?
Ok, so I haven’t blogged in awhile – all I can say is I’ve been busy…
Anyways, I was setting up an online account last night with one of my banks and I was shocked at the fact that it wouldn’t allow me to use special characters in my password (i.e. !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *). I knew some didn’t allow this but after stepping back and looking at the situation I realized 38% of my financial institutions do not allow me to have a *real* strong password – they limit you to using [a-z], [A-Z], or [0-9]. I guess to them Carl1979 is considered strong enough and they don’t believe there’s any justification for me to have a password such as 6OE92k21$.
The offending banks:
• Washington Mutual – 6th largest bank in the United States!
• HSBC – 4th largest bank in the world!
• Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – 7th largest bank in the world!
Now I don’t know about you, but I find it concerning that I can have a more secure password on my MySpace profile than I can with the top banks in the world. 
