I Really Don’t Know

Silkworm, Folksonomies, looking at things backwards

A colleague of mine has been looking at Folksonomies recently and it’s likely to feautre more and more in our work, but his post on Reversed folksonomy is really interesting. This is very much the culture of Silkworm, a networking project I’m involved in.

Something interesting always happens when you look at things backwards. The stuff above is a great example; a number of years ago I was penetration testing (legitimately) and developed the reverse brute force attack for gaining network access - passwords are secret, usernames are known. A brute force attack tries every password against a known name. I gained access by trying a few likely (i.e. probably known) passwords against every possible username. It would be interesting to know just how many online banks would be vulnerable to that?

You see, look at things backwards and something interesting falls out.

update: typo corrected; “A bruce force attack tries every password against a known name.” This is not to be confused with a Bruce Forsyth attack which David Leigh-Fellows has just pointed out to me involves attempting access using jokes about your mother-in-law.