Oh all of my configs are deny root ssh login or without-password. I noticed a significant decrease in scans when returning a root prompt when I did that. This was also in the mid 2000s so who knows how things would be in this day in age for a reduction in scans
@Pacmanlives
So it was a fake root prompt which tricked the bots into believing that they logged in successfully but in reality the prompt could do nothing on the system?
It should be that it rejects the password the first time it’s entered correctly but accepts it on every subsequent try. That actually would provide some protection against like dictionary attacks and raw brute force attacks.
Won’t protect against an offline attack (just will confuse the hell out of the hacker) but might confound an online attack? Until someone gets wise and runs the tool a second time. Loving the chaotic neutral vibes here.
It doesn’t really even protect against online attacks though. Like, if you’re going through a list of known accounts, by definition it won’t be any of those accounts’ first time logging in, right?
And if you’re not going through a list of known accounts, good luck getting anywhere with your attack any time this millennia
The guy coding made it so, on your first attempt, even if you answer correctly, it will tell you your login failed due to incorrect username or password, to joke about how it feels like you always get it wrong on the first try
The logic is bugging me, though. It should be if isFirstAttempt || !isPasswordCorrect
I understand the meme is trying to convey in spite of being correct to still return an error, but then it doesn’t account for when the password is actually incorrect.
The idea is that brute-force attackers will only check each password once, while real users will likely assume they mistyped and retype the same password.
The code isn’t complete, and has nothing to do with actually incorrect passwords.
Well yeah, if you don’t truncate the password to 12 chars how will you fit the plaintext in a memory efficient fixed latin1 CHAR column that only accepts letters, numbers, and underscores
And then validate the email with a custom regex that definitely doesn’t account for all the valid syntax permutations defined by the several email-oriented RFCs
Only on mobile though, on desktop have different criteria. Perhaps give the text box an arbitrary max length of like 30 characters on sign-in but not on account creation.
I’ve had that before and I’m very confident the password was correct - my theory is that they’d changed how non-ASCII characters like £ were handled and their code only half recognised my password.
Yeah I thought about adding a note that it’s pretty outdated - and dictionary based scans were always possible even if less common in the old days - like those infamous passwords “God”, “Love”, “secret”, or like “admin”.
The artist is pretty smart most of the time though so I presume they were aware of that possibility and meant that on a more basic level there are multiple ways to make passwords easier for a user to remember, not necessarily just this one rather simplistic take but as part of a whole approach. Then again, they didn’t say that, and instead said this, thus the controversy.
Personally I gave up entirely and now I don’t even know what any of my own passwords are, though my password manager does:-). I guess… if you cannot beat them, join them!?:-P
My current favorite “memorizable” method (obviously a random hash from a PW manager is still better) is to take a sentence of moderate complexity that includes the name of the service you’re signing up for in it, and use the first letter of each word as your password.
For example, “When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is go to pawb.social.”
Password would be “WIwuitm,tftIdigtps.”
Easy to remember, immune to dictionary attacks, and you get a (mostly) unique password for each service, so stolen passwords can only access that one thing.
Edit: To be clear, the value is that you can use the same sentence everywhere, switching out the name of the service to generate semi-unique passwords for each service. Obviously someone analyzing your passwords would be able to figure out the pattern, but that’s basically never what actually happens; it’s more likely someone gets 1 password and tries your email address + that PW in a variety of services, which this is strong against.
I have a strict, “do I give a fuck” policy when it comes to security.
I keep the harder to crack passwords for critical things like banking, etc… since there’s only a few I can remember them. I also always use MFA.
For all the other shit that I don’t give a fuck if it’s hacked it’s the good old *Banana$1234" type password that I reuse for decades and save to firefox’s password manager.
It’s surprisingly easy to memorize. The sentence basically acts as a mnemonic device to remember the password, and it’s a lot easier to memorize a sentence that makes sense to you than to memorize something like “Tr0ub4d0r&8”.
I dunno, all I do is hit copy, then go to the website and hit paste, and that’s pretty easy as well:-P.
I do need to step up my game for work though, b/c it keeps asking me a password multiple times a day so if I could rattle one off that would be better than having to open up my password manager and get it.
Dictionary attacks have been around for a long time, but It’s still quite strong especially if you throw in a number.
A fully random 8 character password has about 10^14 brute force combinations (assuming upper and lower case + the normal special characters). 4 words choosen at random from the top 3000 words (which is a very small vocabulary really) is 10^13 dictionary attack combinations, add a single number or account for variations in word style (I.e maybe don’t always use camel case) and you’ve matched the difficulty. If you use 5 words it’s 10^17 combinations.
A password manager and a hard password is a better idea but there are cases where you can’t use a password manager (like the password to said manager).
I do a passphrase like the comic followed by 56 characters of gibberish using an onlykey.io (acts as a USB keyboard) that has a 10 digit pin (6 characters to choose from) and a kill switch pin (if I were ever forced to unlock it). I use this method for my disk encryption, main account login, and password manager.
I also use a www.themooltipass.com for vendor diversity (4 digit pin but all hex characters). I prefer the onlykey.
I rotate the gibberish monthly and the passphrase 2-3 times a year.
Once a year I change up the pin codes.
I figure that gives me enough entropy from brute force on all my systems with a balanced level of convienence and security. I literally don’t know a single one of my passwords.
The rainbow table would have to include every four word combination. At around half a million words in the English dictionary, that’s not a small number.
As another XKCD comic illustrates, it’s cheaper to use a wrench.
Example of what My passwords are like : %*7EfOLkN@6AP28!8Dl#
or potentially if allowed : W@c2wYnN9J3xGcyc47#ZkHJvt&Hm%q&Ad0b&Xwz#jnl4Th%6UBexD16a$YBFc@svnVrCBxXP0EpwLp6%Gk*Lom%@Qq#DjY1zsf0CzIrHHqPc8gt4edDVsg!omj*kIsIJ
Good luck guessing my shit.
I suspect if the cracking code was constructed such that it had more weight on trying combinations of common words then this would be much easier to crack
I would naively think that as well - you would expand your alphabet of “symbols” to include both single letters and numbers and punctuation but also common words as well. It is still a lot of combinations to have to try though, even if less than each letter by itself.
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