[brianpan]

Besides legal, I think it's important to realize that there is a very emotional response to discovering that your password is not good.

I know a company that started doing quarterly brute-forcing of passwords as a security check and the reaction to finding out that your password is not strong enough is....all sorts of emotions.

If you have a 10-12 character password that may have been strong at one point but now is not and your IT team is informing you, you're reaction is NEVER, oh thank you for helping me out. It's not stupidity, it's human nature to feel attacked.

[dano]

As part of fixing security problems 20+ years ago we put together a migration process that included cracking passwords. First off we created an interface for updating your password and that interface essentially ran through all the tests that the cracking software to better ensure you'd picked something good. Passwords were expired every 90 days (remember, this was 2001. The migration first set the expiration date so that people got used to the process and then, on occasion, we'd run the passwords through a brute force attack. To your point, the users were most unhappy when their password would get cracked and expired, but that's life. 2FA, keys, etc.. is really an improvement over what we've had for such a long time.

[doix]

When a 12 character gets bruteforced, my initial reaction is to blame the system for allowing so many password attempts!

Like imagine how many failed attempts must've happened for a 12 character password to get bruteforced. Alarms should have been raised way before it became an issue.

[brianpan]

The password doesn't get brute forced via an API. The threat model would be more like your salted and hashed passwords got exported and now they can be brute forced. A 12 character password in the DB can be brute forced in seconds or minutes. If your password is strong it will take years or millenia.

That's what haveibeenpwned.com is about. It tells you if your email is in one of these database lists out in the wild. If it is, assume your password will eventually be discovered.

[barkingcat]

what if it was a crappy 12 character password like 123456789012 and got bruteforced in 2 tries?

also, at one point it was popular to use l33t speak for passwords so there are many crappy 12+ char l33t passwords floating around that are trivial to guess, no brute forcing required.