It is not really OSX, but PAM [1]. And one can understand why when looking at this Stackexchange answer [2]: > This is a security thing, it's not actually taki

It is not really OSX, but PAM [1]. And one can understand why when looking at this Stackexchange answer [2]: > This is a security thing, it's not actually taking long to realize it. 2 vulnerabilities this solves: > 1. this throttles login attempts, meaning someone can't pound the system as fast as it can go trying to crack it (1M attempts a sec? I don't know). > 2. If it did it as soon as it verified your credentials were incorrect, you could use the amount of time it took for it to invalidate your credentials to help guess if part of your credentials were correct, dramatically reducing the guessing time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluggable_authentication_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluggable_authentication_modul... [2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2126/why-is-there-a-big-delay-after-entering-a-wrong-password https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2126/why-is-there-a...