Day: July 27, 2017

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Wow That’s Secure!

So secure that even I (the intended recipient can’t get it….

My insurance company sent me a message saying that there were messages waiting on their site.

There’s a link. It’s valid, and does in fact link to their web site.

I click on the link, and it takes me to a page that asks me to create a password to view my messages. I create a password. Then I get five emails in my normal email, each of them contains a PDF that is encrypted. I figure out that the password I just created in fact will open these PDFS. 

I enter the password and find that each of the PDFs says the same thing. NOTHING.

In the mean time, the password has reset ALL my passwords on for the insurance company and since I had their application running on my phone when the password reset happened. That counted as an invalid attempt to access the account. Then I try to acces the account from their web site to see if I can read the messages they wanted me to read…  BOOM, now I’m locked out. 

I tried to reset my password again… NOPE! Too many accesses within too short a time…

I still don’t have the messages that they wanted to send me.

I call my agent. They don’t have any idea what the company is trying to reach me about. I ask my agent to tell the company I’m not going to use their web site anymore. I want every communication on paper, mailed to me with a stamp. 

I’ve spent over an hour trying to get this all so important message from the company and honestly… I’ve lost my desire to worry about it. They can wait for me to get the information on paper via USPS. 

Technology is supposed to make this kind of thing easier, not harder.

The really annoying thing is that I have several encryption keys. The insurance company could have simply accessed one of the public keys, encrypted the message and sent it securely to my email where I could have conveniently read my message. 

All of this pissing around with their kludge “security” has done nothing but annoy the hell out of me. It’s screwed up the account for me and my other half and now I’ll have to spend yet more time (probably hours) unfucking this fuckup.

Grrrrr!