There is a saying in engineering.

Anyone can build a bridge.

It takes an engineer who can build a bridge just strong enough to let cars cross it.

I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it’s still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.

Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.

I’d love to see something similar with robots.

I remember one interview I had with a candidate. It was for a database analyst position that required SQL.

The first round was typically a phone screen where I chat with the candidate, get to know them a bit.

Second round was code review. I asked them to do a SQL query that did x.

The queries were simple. The goal was to get the candidate to walk through the query.

I had one candid that, over screen share, wrote the query flawlessly. Then I asked them to explain what it was doing. The candidate froze.

I can get understand getting nervous so I moved onto an insert statement. I had them write one and then do another without using certain terms (often leading to a sub query).

Again, flawless. I asked what situations would you use one over the other.

Again, they froze. I started to get suspicious that they were cheating and had them, instead of typing the answer, say the answer. When they couldn’t, I knew enough that it wasn’t going to work.

It’s definitely worth learning. I had the damnedest time with docker until I went to a meetup and had someone ELI5 to me. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t technical. I just couldn’t wrap my head around so many layers of extraction.

The guy was very patient with me and helped me get started with docker compose and the rest is history.

Yes but this wasn’t a data breach. This was a data stuffing incident, meaning they took someone else’s data dump and tried their email and credentials here.

• never use the same username and password in two or more places
• always use MFA, a hard token if you can like a yubikey

Yahoo news is notorious for this. It’s like an ad after every paragraph and every paragraph is just one sentence.