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
- Designing agentic loops - 30th September 2025
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 is probably the "best coding model in the world" (at least for now) - 29th September 2025
- I think "agent" may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now - 18th September 2025