markhemmings

Epic how quickly that XSS vulnerability was fixed. Great work guys!

My initial thoughts are just why not do this client side using javascript? No need for the string to leave the client.

I agree with and applaud the use of seriously here ;)

True, account should be disabled after x number of bad guesses. But securing against a "brute force" attack for me is more a case of cracking hashes from a db dump. It's easy to churn though vast numbers of hashes in no time at all these days. Here things like hashing algorithm speed, number of iterations, unique salting and original password length all have a part to play.

Completely agree. For example, I use two-factor authentication on all accounts that allow me to. Regarding limiting to 12 characters, the sites in question there are putting there users at risk and it's very likely they aren't storing passwords correctly, leaving anything you put in that password box vulnerable anyway.

It was a larger number at first, but try remembering say 10 words in a row over a long period of time; most people find that difficult. If hashing is implemented properly (i.e. is slow with a large number of iterations) then passphrases shouldn't have to be that long. And if it isn't, then pretty much anything you use will be as bad as each other (Some people are still using MD5 for example!!) :)

"How To Lose 20lbs" is currently trending on Twitter. Vast numbers of profiles seem to be tweeting the spam link

I'm the guy who originally contacted Troy Hunt about this, as he mentions in the blog post.

What annoys me is I'm a very young developer, and I've only really just become interested in security (12 months ago I didn't even know what hashing was!!!), yet there's developers out there with years and years of experience making huge sites for the likes of Tesco and TopCashBack for vast sums of money and they don't think about incorporating even the simplest foundations of internet security a novice like me would implement without even thinking! How is this possible?! If I'm doing it in tiny little php sites with 1 unique visitor ever, why are these 'experts' not in there huge corporate sites with hundreds of thousands of users a month?!