> What is the rationale for disabling paste on passwords, account numbers, other "sensitive" data?

Cargo-cult internet "security" practices are legion in the retail-banking sector. Like with most things it starts with good-intentions but when modern research suggests better-things the worst of them just knuckle-down with hypertension-inducing results: https://www.troyhunt.com/tag/banks/

TL;DR:

* Banks think that having users remember their banking-passwords and commit them to memory is far preferable to having users use password-managers.

** Password managers on Windows can theoretically get hacked by malware:

*** Ssure, the data is encrypted at-rest, often with your DPAPI key (e.g. Chrome and Edge's built-in manager) or with 2FA (e.g. LastPass), but none of the password-managers I've used on Windows (Chrome, Edge, IE's, Firefox's, LastPass, etc) take any steps to protect their hWnds from inspection by other userland processes running at the same privilege level. This does surprise me - I honestly would have hoped/thought that by-now password managers would use Office IRM-style protections ( e.g. `SetWindowDisplayAffinity` https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21268004/how-does-office... ) and/or accessing the password-database and showing results in an elevated hWnd to protect them from lower-privileged hWnds and processes).

* Banks believe that password-managers present a risk to their customers (and by-extension: their own bottom-line[1]) because:

** If they do recommend users use a password-manager then they run the risk of a user downloading and using a scam or malicious password-manager and then blaming the bank once their account gets hacked and drained.

*** Banks don't want to get into the business of recommending any particular password manager: there's too many to choose and it's not their business to vet the good ones from the bad ones.

*** So it's easier just to not recommend using any password-manager. This then logically extends to recommending not using a password-manager, using whatever weak reasons exist for arguing against them.

* As for why paste is disabled: This notable article by Troy Hunt deals with this exact issue https://www.troyhunt.com/the-cobra-effect-that-is-disabling/

** The first reason blame-shifts to the bank's accrediation/certification/PCI/EV/etc process - which seems sus, though plausible, depending on exactly what certification's rules and guidelines could be broadly misinterpreted by whatever technophobic upper-executive in charge of a bank's retail online banking user-experience.

** The other examples listed seem (to me) to be all around discouraging users from copying their passwords into their clipboard and pasting it into websites so that their users eventually give-up and stop copying it at all and instead type it in by-hand - the concern being that malware running in the background on the user's machine could monitor the clipboard and steal passwords that way - which I'll agree is a real concern to have, but the fact that users will try to copy and paste it at first and that by typing it in renders them vulnerable to keyloggers (and if a program is already monitoring the clipboard, that program could just-as-easily be a keylogger).

[1] because they'll likely be found liable for losses caused by unauthorized customer account access due to phishing, etc. Their liability varies between jurisdictions, though I haven't noticed a correlation between jurisdictional liability and banks' general intransigence towards modern evidence-based infosec...