is 1 "too many login attempts" ?

[sidguppy]

see title

I ran against is bug today.
logged in with my proper login name and my password and right at the first attemt I get a whole screen starting with "you have used too many login attempts" etc etc

and then one of THE nastiest to decipher captcha's I so far encountered on the web; I had to retry at least 6 times before i got one that I could read.


I understand that to avoid spambots and hacking of accounts, there is a limit to login attempts
but to set the limit at "1 is too many attempts already" is over the top imo.

[Juan Artigas]

Somebody was trying to hack in your account, so the account got the maximum limit of attempts (five) before the captcha verification appears. unfortunately, this is not at all uncommon these days, I have had it myself quite a few times recently. It seems to be the latest effort by spammers to get through the protection measurements we have to post their nasty garbage. And believe me, for what we intercept in moderation, is really nasty garbage.

[sidguppy]

aha!
well, that explains a lot

the main problem was that I can follow a strategy of maximum 5 login attempts; the fact that it already happened at 1 baffled me at first
but if someone repeatedly tried to hack it, my "trial "logins" were obviously used

for some odd reason capthca's (or however it's called/spelled) are very hard to decrypt for me, especially when they're 'thin", light colored and wriggly.
i can't read them.......

it just turns into 1 squiggly picture that seems to move like a can of worms when I look at it.
it took me several attempts to get one I could decrypt well enough to log in

[Juan Artigas]

I understand, and even so, we have twenty or more registrations everyday by spammers. which should be manual. I guess if we didn't have the captcha, they would be making dictionary attacks against user accounts all the time.