The idea is simple and good, but there's a problem in its
implementation: usually modern systems doesn't compare the password you
write with the saved password; instead, they compare an hash of your
password attempt with the saved hash of your current password. By
design, two similar string have strongly different hashes. So you can't
compare two hashes and say if they correspond to two similar words.
Greets,
Fabio

Sebastiaan Veenstra wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I didn't read the whole discussion about this issue but I came up with
> an idea which might be usefull to detect brute force attempt. By
> storing the passwords a certain user has used in the past along with
> the current password you could be able to compare to password (by
> pattern matching) used at the login attempts with the passwords list.
> If the password used differs significantly (this excludes typos) from
> the entries in the password list, there could be a possible brute
> force attempt. The reason for storing the previous passwords is that
> people tend to use every password they've used in the past when they
> forgot their password. Maybe this idea can be used along with the
> other methods of detecting brute force attempts. Anyway, it's just a
> random thought.
>
> Greets,
>
> Sebastiaan
>

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