Password security notes

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As noted in other threads on several mailing lists, a few admin accounts
on en.wikipedia have been compromised recently, used to vandalize
high-traffic protected pages.

We're starting to roll out some additional protections against
password-guessing attacks, including but not limited to:

* Additional logging to better detect dictionary-style attacks

* Speed-bump measures against multiple failed logins
[But not that should DoS legitimate users. The traditional "lock out the
account after three tries" would make it trivial to lock out all the
site's sysops -- not wise. :)]

* Weak-password checks on existing sysops on our largest sites. Several
accounts have had their weak passwords invalidated and will need to
reset by mail before logging in again.

* Several targeted blocks against known cracking attempts.


Over the coming days we will additionally be rolling out more automated
password-strength checkers at login / set-password / change-password
time to reduce the danger of guessable passwords.


Please distribute this information as appropriate to your local
projects/languages.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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