If you thought your AOL password was extremely secure, you might want to think again.
A flaw that was recently discovered in the AOL password system. Although AOL advertises that you can have a 16 character password, and indeed you can enter 16 characters, only 8 of those are actually needed to access your account.
Therefore, if your AOL password is ‘password123456', it would actually only read as ‘password', which is much less secure. But just how less secure?
Using all letters, upper case and lower, plus digits that are available on the keyboard, you can have 47,672,401,710,000,000,000,000,000,000 more character combinations with a 16 character password then an 8.
AOL ignores anything passed the 8 character mark, so if your password was ‘password123456', someone could enter both ‘password', and ‘password72', and it would let them into your account – any numbers, or letters, after the first 8 characters are ignored completely.
The only comment that AOL has made so far is that they are looking into the matter, but for many this isn't enough – some members have said that if the problem isn't fixed, they'll terminate their accounts. This could cause a sever blow to AOL, who has literally millions of paying members.
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