I'm back and what's this?

[jonesy]

Real Life, the heartless monster, took over my life to such an extent that I haven't even had time to check the forums since summer.

So I come back and find a whole pile of email messages saying that someone has been frantically trying to access my account. Should I be worried, or what?

The messages all read like this:
"Someone has tried to log into your account on EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine with an incorrect password at least 5 times. This person has been prevented from attempting to login to your account for the next 15 minutes."

I got a lot of the emails, and I take the messages to mean that it's 5 tries per email, so it's a lot of tries.

 

[Morrus]

It sounds very much like somebody has been trying to log into your account. Unsuccessfully, from the sohnds of it.

You're right - that's 5 attempts per email. Looks like they're trying a lot of passwords.

Can you think of anyone who might do that?

 

[jonesy]

The messages all mention the ip address of the person, but it doesn't belong to anyone I know. And even beyond that I can't think of anyone who'd want to target me like that.

 

[Morrus]

If you pass it to me I can do a search to see if it belongs to other member here.

 

[jonesy]

PM sent.

edit: I tried searching for the ip and surprisingly (or not) found it listed on several anti-forum-spam websites and bot-lists.

 

[Morrus]

It wasn't a member here. So yeah, looks like some kind of spambot was trying to brute-force your account. Probably worth changing your password to make sure it's as complex as you're likely to remember.

 

[Umbran]

You do have a very "common name" kind of username, so I can see why they'd try.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Probably worth changing your password to make sure it's as complex as you're likely to remember.

Or better yet, as long as you can see xkcd: Password Strength for why!

 

[Holy Bovine]

Or better yet, as long as you can see xkcd: Password Strength for why!

I love that comic. I've converted most of passwords to this format and now every one of them is actually different!

 

[jonesy]

I love that comic. I've converted most of passwords to this format and now every one of them is actually different!

In my previous job the password setup they had only allowed passwords of the first type. And it had an upper limit on password length, which was some odd number like 7. So..