Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Fun with Key Tokens
I never thought I would become one of those stupid customer tech support stories, but I think I qualified for one yesterday.
I have various online banking and brokerage accounts. I typically log in to each of them on a fairly regular basis to monitor for possible unauthorized transactions and to generally just check things out. Yesterday, I tried to log in to my eTrade account. No luck. Over and over I tried, and each time I got a message saying the password was incorrect. I got locked out multiple times, and finally called Tech Support.
When Tech Support answered, I explained that I had a key token from them as a security device. In their system, you enter your user name, then your password, immediately followed by the code being displayed on the key token. I had been using it for several months without incident. On this particular day, however, I noticed that for the first time it was displaying something other than just six numbers -- it was instead sometimes showing a combination of numbers and letters. Some of the letters were upper case, some were lower case. I explained this to the friendly Tech Support guy, who was baffled. "It isn't supposed to do that." "Well, I hadn't seen it do it before, but figured I just hadn't previously seen all the permutations it was capable of." Nope. He asked if it had gone through the washer or been in direct sunlight. (That would make it display new characters? Who knew?!) It had not. He decided I was going to have to send it in, because it had obviously entered a new dimension of weirdness.
While he was explaining how he was going to have to send me a new one, I took another look and a small, dim lightbulb started to glow in my head. I realized from looking at the very fine print "Secured by RSA" on the front of the key token that it was upside down! What appeared to be 266IEL was really 731992! The very primitive font used to display the number in the key token made some of them appear to be letters when turned around. 3's became E's, 7's became L's, and so forth.
I was grateful the problem was fixable (i.e., there wasn't a real problem), but I hated having to explain to the Tech Support guy that yes, once again, the problem was user error!
