Topic: News - Make sure your password isn't something common.

[Jim]

Recently SMF forums and others have been experiencing some brute-force attacks from spammers.  These spammers harvest member names by viewing the portion of the forum that guest can view.  They add these names to a list, then use that list to attempt login by using another list of common words to guess your password.  This is a good reason to make sure your password contains letter, numbers and symbols that would be practically impossible for someone to guess.  

I removed over 500 pages of login errors this morning.  I also installed a 2 line modification that should help to stop this.  Rest assured that the SMF team is working hard at eliminating this recent spammer activity.

[Tina]

That sucks, Jim. I am glad you are working on it.

[sunsoaker]

I'm glad your on top of things Jim!

[bayou girl]

me too.  spammers just suck.

[Triss]

Horrible Jim.  Glad you are on top of things.  I tend to use a password that has both letters and numbers but I guess I need to get even more creative than that with all of the sophisticated hacking that is going on these days.

[Jim]

Random letters and numbers are good.  This is more of a dictionary attack in that they are trying common words from the dictionary.  When it first started happening, one of the developers wrote a small script that recorded the password try and there were some interesting ones there.

[wimc]

Passwords should never contain names, pet names, birthday, maiden names. Should also use letters (lower and upper case), numbers and symbols (-, ?, +, =).