[BenLurkin]

It just occurred to me how useful it would be to them to simply change the passwords of people who they wanted to lock out of the internet. Do enough at the same time and a lot of dissent would come to a grinding halt.

[null and void]

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[zeugma]

It just occurred to me how useful it would be to them to simply change the passwords of people who they wanted to lock out of the internet. Do enough at the same time and a lot of dissent would come to a grinding halt.

Yup. That's one way to do a denial of service attack against specific individuals.

In many corporations, such DOS attacks against users is absolutely trivial to implement, as all it takes is 3 or 4 bad login attempts to lockout a user. Some even implement this in their webmail accounts that are tied to their user accounts. How hard is it for someone to go to a starbucks and lockout a whole series of executives just by killing (temporarily anyway) their current password, as the userIDs are so easy to guess.