2026-04-10 17:13 UTC
In cass it's not clear from other comments, if the site tells you either one's wrong but not both, you can then brute force and try out a bunch of usernames and passwords to effectively farm for both: those that say "wrong username" means that the password is valid, while those that say "wrong password" means you got the username that's in the system.
Once you've collected them, the rest is just trying out every password for every user.
So... while this seems weird for a person, it is very much intentional.
Edit after several comments: I don't know why it's hard for people to look at the OP, take it for what it is, and argue for the sake of the argument, rather than claiming that something's impossible because of common or correct technical practices.
Replies (3)
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@scutiger@lemmy.world 2026-04-10 18:29
There's no way of knowing if a password is valid without the matching username. That doesn't make any sense.
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@Malgas@beehaw.org 2026-04-11 08:29
> those that say “wrong username” means that the password is valid How could it mean that? The only reason you'd ever say "wrong username" is if the account doesn't exist (otherwise it's indistinguishable from "wrong password") and in that case there's no reason to even look at the password.
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@InputZero@lemmy.world 2026-04-10 18:44
Yeah a wrong username means both are wrong. That's not how it works, that's not how any of this works.