Login Brute-Force Protection

Discussions center on preventing brute-force attacks via rate-limiting, throttling failed login attempts, account lockouts, and related security measures like error messages and username enumeration prevention.

📉 Falling 0.4x Security
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#4122
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Keywords

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Sample Comments

euroclydon Jan 21, 2010 View on HN

Why not just lock out a user after n failed login attempts?

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 Nov 25, 2020 View on HN

This scenario is not realistic, as you can just lengthen time between subsequent login attempts per username.

pistle Jun 26, 2016 View on HN

Can someone school me in why we don't just throttle login attempts (each fail extends time to next attempt exponentially) and put an attempt cap that requires password reset?

durpkingOP Jan 20, 2023 View on HN

did you at least put a responsible error message for all people with failed logins to mitigate the issue?

greenyoda May 2, 2018 View on HN

A pretty common policy is to lock out an account after a few consecutive failed login attempts.

hynek Jan 7, 2016 View on HN

You should rate-limit your logins anyway lest you want to end like Apple & Fappening.

vntok Jan 28, 2024 View on HN

Rate-limit after x failed logins on either source IP, username and password. Just provide a realworld sidechannel escape hatch for legitimate users (ex: phone or email). Barely anyone will actually use it.

citizens Aug 4, 2016 View on HN

I imagine it would make it harder for bots to brute-force login credentials.

truted2 Mar 8, 2021 View on HN

Would this "fraud" detection be triggered by some unauthorized user trying their account password too many times or a more sophisticated attack?

sippeangelo Oct 26, 2025 View on HN

The answer should be that it's a privacy leak! Do you allow random actors to brute force your login?