How could GitHub improve the password security of its users?
20th November 2013
My answer to How could GitHub improve the password security of its users? on Quora
By doing exactly what they’re doing already: adding more sophisticated rate limiting, and preventing users from using common weak passwords.
Their account security practices are already best-in-industry: they support two-factor authentication and their “Security History” interface at https://github.com/settings/secu... is the best I’ve seen on any website.
The way they store passwords (correctly, using bcrypt) had nothing to do with this particular security incident.
More recent articles
- The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
- Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025
- LLM 0.27, the annotated release notes: GPT-5 and improved tool calling - 11th August 2025