Shame they didn’t include traffic to security.stackexchange.com . I would have thought that would show a more noticeable change. Also would be interesting to see what tags there show the biggest increases
“Why bother posting this?” - that’s easy, because it might hit the front page of HN and someone from Google might see it and actually apply human reasoning to the problem.
For uk banking systems it is very likely that the passwords are stored symmetrically encrypted with the key stored in an HSM (based on my experience working as an IT security consultant in UK banks).
Whilst limiting passwords isn’t good, with storage in that way i’m nt sure I see many viable attacks on a 12 char random password.
Online brute force will hit the lockout on the site, and even assuming you could get access to the server hosting the encrypted passwords and HSM you cant decrypt the passwords (unless they have made some horrific setup errors), so the only offline attack is to try and brute force the encryption key, which is unlikely to be easy.
If you base off alpine, you can get useful containers quite a lot smaller than 100MB.
One example i use is an agent i deploy to kubernetes clusters to do some security scanning. The scripts are ruby and the image clocks in at 9MB compressed https://hub.docker.com/r/raesene/kaa-agent/tags/
Have you tried pocket? I used to keep a load of bookmarks but the problem was that after a while many of the source urls would die off. So something like pocket is very handy as it takes a copy of the page you're interested in.