Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

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> ... and then realize with a horrible feeling that some % of those hits are getting through the login page.

The alternative is the exact same scenario, except that the percentage is several orders of magnitude lower, right?

The small subset of your users that explicitly opted-out of 2-factor authentication (if you allow that) and who try to choose "Password1!" with a second exclamation point when your site said "Error, your password has seen 83,000 times in password dumps, please use a unique password" will still get hacked.

Or is your expectation that no one will attack every user on your webapp with a credential stuffing attempt if they see that the probability of success is 0.001% instead of 1%?

Wait, a thousand fold decrease is not worth it?

Your numbers literally turns a scenario where 200,000 accounts are hacked into one where 200 are exposed. Or one where 30 hacked accounts turn into 0 hacked accounts.

There is a point where a difference in quantity becomes a difference in quality. I far prefer the latter scenarios.

Anybody (like GP) that doesn’t understand that this is entirely the nature of security work, should not be making any material decisions about security.

The number of times I’ve seen DEVELOPERS neglect to implement materially useful security measures because “they’re not technically perfect!” Is astounding.

The number of times I’ve seen purported security practitioners dismiss materially useful security measures because of some theoretical attack that nobody has ever seen in the wild in recorded history outside of stunt-hacking at Defcon is…probably higher

The bad feeling comes from knowing you could have reasonably done something to mitigate the harm. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Remember that "identity theft" is marketing fluff. In a credential stuffing attack your business is the victim of fraud.

Yes, same scenario, but far fewer logins are successful. 3 orders of magnitude sounds right, but I don't know precise numbers. (Can others shed light?) Three orders of magnitude is a lot!

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