Or rather, the gaps in our data represent times when it focused elsewhere.
From our point of view, the swarm stayed away for a while and came back stronger, for a couple of iterations.
Clearly, not everybody was listning to online rants about guessable passwords.
For a while, the distributed approach appeared to be working.
It was (of course) during a growth period I coined the phrase "The Hail Mary Cloud".
Instantly, a myriad of "Hail Mary" experts joined the insta-punditry on /. and elsewhere.