After a fortnight at that rate they would have been able to try over a billion different passwords.
If just one of those “other” websites doesn't automatically lock accounts after multiple incorrect attempts, an attacker could simply use a brute-force attack, making thousands of login requests per second with different guesses at the password.
Passwords plus coupon password#
However, for a variety of reasons, currently most users do not use password management software, or do not use the password generation features fully – and we have a duty to protect those users too.
Passwords plus coupon registration#
different domains used for registration vs login). “enter 3rd, 8th and 10th characters you’re your password”, or by attempting to block clipboard paste) or accidentally (e.g. Make sure that the design of the authentication system doesn’t either block their use either intentionally (e.g. Providing good support for password managers – and advising our users to adopt them – is one of the best ways systems designers and implementors can improve password security.
Passwords plus coupon software#
Those users who make use of password management software will normally use a distinct password for each website and are unlikely to be susceptible to this issue. Microsoft data on attacks shows more than 20 million attempts daily on their systems using such guessed or stolen credentials. These sorts of attacks are very common – Verizon's research suggests that the credentials are stolen in up to 35% of system breaches, and that guessed or stolen credentials are used in over 80% of attacks. While most won't work, a few will, and our attacker will be in. Once the attacker has a list of candidate usernames/email addresses and the corresponding passwords, they can try them against our site (and against lots of other high-value sites). This frequent re-use of passwords means that an attacker doesn’t need to directly attack our website to crack our users’ passwords – they can instead first attack one of the many other websites which may have weaker security, where some of our users may have used the same password as they used on our website. Analysis of real-life passwords suggests that 70+% of passwords may be re-used across multiple websites. Password usage data from LastPass, a password management service, indicates that, while over 90% of users “know” that using the same password for multiple accounts is more risky, two-thirds of them do so nevertheless. Unfortunately, not only do people tend to choose weak passwords – they also frequently use the same passwords on many different websites – whether it be their online banking or trading login, their gym membership, for a dating site or for a coupon club.
With only 5 or 10 attempts to guess each password, an attacker would have to get pretty lucky to guess something like “Gr4p3fru1t42!”, surely? Re-cycling Good – Password Re-use Bad! Combined with automatic account lock-outs after a small number of failed login attempts, and keeping the passwords safe and secure within our systems, we would seem to have effectively prevented attackers from guessing our users' passwords. So we prevent users from creating such very simple passwords by forcing them to create a reasonably long password which uses multiple character sets. To try to stop users from choosing such easy-to-guess passwords most sites use a combination of password complexity rules – "use mixed case and include at least one number" – and length requirements. As we saw in part 1, users left to their own devices will tend to choose weak passwords.
Almost all online services use passwords to authenticate users.
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