Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi...
by RandomWorker on Friday June 05, 2020 @09:48AM
(#23428458)
I’ve been thinking that it could be a great safety feature. If every site had its own mapping then uses a hash it would eliminate simple password matching. If they get access to the database, you could find the password by taking common paswords hash them and do a match. This would not be impossible with the speed of databases. If every site did that it could prevent this line of attack. I can’t really see a bad thing about.
However, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from a tweet.
The author is a journalist covering China so she might already had performed various 'tests' on her WeChat account that raised various red flags for various reasons until her account ended up being flagged for deletion.
If they are really checking cleartext passwords against 'offensive' keywords they are impressively thorough, tbh, but it would still seem odd to delete an account just like that instead of rejecting the password so I'm thinking that there is more to her story, if it is true.