If you ever go to r/relationship_advice and read posts where their friend T did S with P and then A (23 F) got into with G, then yeah...Alice and Bob suddenly makes a lot of sense.
Back then, everything was done through a travel agent and they often got kickbacks if you took certain routes. No doubt some agents got a bonus for routing them so circuitously.
I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it's still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.
Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.
I remember one interview I had with a candidate. It was for a database analyst position that required SQL.
The first round was typically a phone screen where I chat with the candidate, get to know them a bit.
Second round was code review. I asked them to do a SQL query that did x.
The queries were simple. The goal was to get the candidate to walk through the query.
I had one candid that, over screen share, wrote the query flawlessly. Then I asked them to explain what it was doing. The candidate froze.
I can get understand getting nervous so I moved onto an insert statement. I had them write one and then do another without using certain terms (often leading to a sub query).
Again, flawless. I asked what situations would you use one over the other.
Again, they froze. I started to get suspicious that they were cheating and had them, instead of typing the answer, say the answer. When they couldn't, I knew enough that it wasn't going to work.
No, it was a few years back when a researcher found that there was a plain text file of county employee social security numbers just sitting inside the JavaScript of a government website.
There are too many Google results from the upcoming election for me to sort through but suffice it to say, the guy was a class A idiot.
Remember ExpertsExchange? They charged people for the correct answer but was in the top 10 results. They got blocked very quickly when Google, yes Google, allowed you to block any site from your search. That feature is now gone and you have to specify that in your search terms.
It's definitely worth learning. I had the damnedest time with docker until I went to a meetup and had someone ELI5 to me. And it wasn't that I wasn't technical. I just couldn't wrap my head around so many layers of extraction.
The guy was very patient with me and helped me get started with docker compose and the rest is history.
The problem is that the people who hold the rights don't want to share. They want that sweet, sweet, monthly subscription income. They don't want to compete because that means they'll potentially earn less and have to spend more.
I tell people about fmovies every chance I get because it has just about anything you are looking for. I've only run into a few titles they don't have.
No registration, completely free, and easy to use.
If the attack was carried out over one IP address, they should have been able to detect it.
There is no real reason why 7 million different accounts access the site from one location.
I don't know how sophisticated the attack was but the future threat is instead of DDOS attacks would be distributed ACCESS attacks where millions of controlled devices attack a site with known credentials to download small bits of information over time. Even better if you can work out ahead of time the account's general location and then assign devices in the area to access that account.
I use yubikey everywhere it's available for me. Initially, the first few websites in the early years were challenging. I think a lot of devs were still trying to figure out the workflow.
But today, it's usually as simple, or simpler, than TOTP.
So it might be worth trying again. I'd use a YubiKey 4 or higher if you can. If you have an older one, you may want to upgrade to take advantage of the newer technology like NFC and Bluetooth if you're into that.
I just wish YubiKey could store more than like 30 TOTP tokens.
I've been learning the same. Though, I don't get the sense that SATA is going out of style. I could be wrong though.