It's surprisingly often that the login page doesn't use the same password processing code as the password reset/account creation pages, and it can be very frustrating at times.
The leak doesn't even need to happen on their site, they could check the password hash against known leaked hashes (from have I been pwned for example) and block it
Why? Probably some wild row length limit being hit where a table storing user data was storing an asinine amount of data, just terrible DB organization in an org where someone said “who even needs a DBA.”
How? If you can truncate user passwords, you should never handle user passwords again, unless you’re a student or hobbyist learning a valuable lesson.
There's no good reason. Whoever did it, did it for a bad reason. (Oh, well, there's no good reason until you reach several thousand characters.)
That said, it could be worse. Some sites do not truncate your password at the creation form, and only truncate it on the login screen. (Yeah, that happened to me, in 2 different sites.)
This often happens when you entered the right password but have a typo in the user name. Everyone tries the password again, but nobody spell checks their email or username.
I had this happen once where input validation on login and password change were different. I was allowed to set my password to a string containing a special character not accepted by the login form. Top men.
Note that for others reading this, what normal people think of as too long probably doesn't signify. Some asshat somewhere may have decided greater than something like 8 characters is "too long." Without telling you. Said asshat may indeed even be on the database side, and concluded somehow that varchar(8) should be sufficient for storing passwords. Right???
It is not only easy for flagrantly badly designed web systems to display this behavior, but also depressingly common. And more closely the page or system you're using is related to your local government, the probability of it being hilariously incompetently designed moves ever closer to becoming 1.
I've never really understood why most systems are set up to reject a password reset if it's the same password. Is there a security issue there that I'm not picking up on?
It seems like they should just let you reset your password anyway if you've reached that screen (usually using some kind of authorisation, like using a link with a token in it that gets emailed to you or something).
The security risk I see is that the cause of you resetting your password could be that it is leaked. For that case, it is good to remind the user that they shouldn't override it with their current password. That said it would be nice to have a "I know what I am doing" option and allow it anyway
As someone who regularly uses a vpn, I've noticed that there's a surprising number of sites that will just lock your account if they decide they don't like your ip address.
It's like when you are trying to blindly install a USB type A . First orientation is wrong so you flip it. Second orientation is wrong so you get confused and flip it again only for it work easily lol.
They're lying about the issue and don't trust that you're who you say you are. It's security systems 101. If you give informative error messages, they can be used to reverse engineer the password of accounts. So every error is going to be "incorrect password"
They’re lying about the issue and don’t trust that you’re who you say you are.
The rest of your comment is just bad. I doubt you even manage to keep that information secret, much less get a positive value out of the entire machination.