mail admins?

Sun Apr 26 14:32:01 UTC 2020

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 07:56:30PM -0700, Michael Thomas wrote:
> $SHINYNEWSITE has only to entice you to enter your reused password which
> comes out in the clear on the other side of that TLS connection.?? basically
> password phishing. you can whine all you like about how stupid they are, but
> you know what... that is what they average person does. that is reality. js
> exploits do not hold a candle to that problem.

Two equally large problems -- neither of which have anything to do with
encryption in transport -- are backend security and password strength.
In the former case, we've seen an ongoing parade of security breaches
and subsequent dataloss incidents.  That parade is still going on.
In the latter case, despite years of screaming from the rooftops, despite
myriad enforcement attempts in code, despite another parade of incidents,
despite everything, we still have people using "password" as a password.

As a side note, I've found it nearly impossible to get users to
understand that there is a qualitative and quantitative difference
between "password used for brokerage account" and "password used for
little league baseball mailing list".

The minor problem of passwords-over-the-wire pales into insignificance
compared to these (and others -- but that's a long list).

---rsk