Every tech company is losing the war against credential stuffing. I have a friend working at a series B startup with None of the service providers who claim to fix the issue are worth their weight in salt. Shape, Akamai, none of them have a grip on the problem because the attackers are constantly evolving. As you can see, even Google is capitulating despite all the fud that people on HN spread about the company being…
There are far better ways to stop credential stuffing than requiring a phone number that would be immediately obvious to the people at Google - Hashcash, for instance[1]. 250M login attempts times a few seconds of CPU time is a lot of compute cost to inflict on an attacker who is carrying out the same attack against a bunch of other services at once, and virtually nothing to the few thousands of active users who shou…
Also there is something to be said for generating the password yourself and sending it in clear to your users by email. The reality is that if the attacker has access to your client’s emails, it’s game over anyway because of password recovery. And this way you enforce that your clients will not reuse a password, and will have a strong non brute forceable password. And if you get hacked, at least you didn’t leak that precious password your users reused everywhere else. The only issue I can think of is that’s because smtp is the most neglected protocol of the internet, there is no way to ensure the email will be encrypted in transit.