On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 7:59 AM, Andre Engels <[email protected]> wrote:
> I do seriously wonder whether it is possible to steal such a password
> 'within minutes or hours'. My calculation says that to do it within 24
> hours, one needs to test 40 million passwords per second. And remember that
> 'testing' in this case means sending a message to the Wikimedia servers and
> waiting for an answer. Surely getting over 1000 times the normal  number of
> requests per second (I have no number for the total number of requests, but
> the number of page requests seems to be around 6000 per second) is something
> that would not remain unnoticed at the Wikimedia servers for 24 hours.

Ignoring the fact that most wiki's are throttled to 5 login attempts
in 5 minutes per IP.

So you can really only check 60 an hour or 1440 a day per IP.  So with
114 Billion/hr rate needed and limited to 60/hr you'd need about 2.4
Billion IP addresses.

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