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Fox News' FTP Password Anyone?
An anonymous reader writes "While browsing around the Fox News website, I found that directory indexes are turned on. So, I started following the tree up, until I got to /admin. Eventually, I found my way into /admin/xml_parser/zdnet/, in which, there is a shell script. Seeing as it's a shell script, and I use Linux, I took a peek. Inside, is a username and password to an FTP. So, of course, I tried to login. The result? Epic fail on Fox's part. And seriously, what kind of password is T1me Out. This is just pathetic." It's already been changed of course, but that's still pretty amusing.
Because now we know; it was just some hacker prank.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm not that much into security, so I hope I don't sound "pathetic", but I was wondering what's wrong with the 'T1me Out' password. I'd say all company passwords I've ever had were no harder than that, and none of them had a space in it. And honestly how many of you guys use a password like YwMCU07D?
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/b/bushlied. htm
Just because you find the key to my car lying on the street doesn't mean you can go for a joy ride.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Random corporation has bad security: Brief blurb about how corporations should take better care of their security infrastructure in order to make sure that leaks/intrusions don't happen. Perhaps even a person or two giving advice in the form of which files to edit and what to change.
Corporation that people don't like has bad security: Note after note about how evil the company is and that they're idiots in the highest sense.
1) The password has probably been around for awhile with no one guessing it. What exactly was wrong with it? Uppercase/lowercase/numbers, combination of multiple words, it is at least moderately strong.
2) Why the hell are you blaming Fox? You think the entire company sat in a conference room and decided on a security scheme and a password?
3) Why did this deserve front page news? Exploits like this are found on a daily basis, and ones much more humorous/interesting/newsworthy.
Bingo! Never, ever, ever! NEVER store a password in plaintext in a script. Not ever. That's always a huge security issue, because you never know who is going to read the file. If you need unattended logins, there's SSH, Kerberos/GSSAPI, whatever.
My blog
this originated on 4chan.org's /b/ late last night (NSFW.) the shell script was a small script for uploading to a ziff-davis ftp server, it wasn't actually a fox ftp password (look at the directory name the shell script was found in, and i'm sure z-d appreciates this too.) also, there was an image directory that had directory listing turned on too. i didn't stick around long enough to see if any /b/tards found anything interesting in there, but i know an image dump was being made.
There's also a difference between 'believing they're there' and 'going to war cause you know they're there, no matter what others think about your plans'.
- These characters were randomly selected.
This isn't about believing in WMDs before the invasion. This is about believing that we found WMDs AFTER the invasion. In an October 2003 poll, for example, 7 months after the invasion, 33% of Fox viewers said that the U.S. had actually physically found WMDs in the course of the invasion. That's 10% higher than the next most confused media viewership. This is what some of us would really love to see explained by you "nothing to see here" apologists. Or else, it sounds like you still maintain that's a reasonable belief today?
http://www.americanassembler.com/issues/media/docs /Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Wow, you are seriously rewriting history, dude. Don't you remember all those statements by the administration claiming they had proof they couldn't show us, and then coming out with a few lame fuzzy satellite photos of trailers and shit? A lot of people didn't buy it at the time -- including me and most of the people I know. I mean, no one doubts that Iraq had once had some hairy weapons programs (find me a government that hasn't), but it was seriously hard to believe they had anything that would threaten the US. Just because you were suckered, you're saying "we all thought..."? Come on, learn from your mistake and move on.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
The specific charge Bush used to get our panties in a wad was nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud." Yellow cake uranium, lie. Aluminum tubes, lie. The CIA was giving Bush solid intel but he and his team refused to accept it. Cheney and his cronies cherry-picked raw intel for the most sensationalistic shit they could find, regardless of whether it was true or not.
When you say "most people assumed Saddam had WMD" you really mean "Most people assumed he had some leftover chemical or biological shit", not that he had nukes ready to strike the west in 45 minutes. The consensus before 9-11, a consensus backed by Powell, was that the US policy of Iraqi containment was working.
I'm sick of lies and lying liars. I'm sick of people who rewrite the facts to justify doing something and then rewrite history to protect themselves from that fuckup.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Oh the irony!
Anyone looking just at the inspectors' reports would not believe that Saddam had "stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction" as was claimed by some. You don't get stockpiles from "losing track of the actual truth". you don't get mass destruction from a few ancient chemical weapons.
Using the advantage of hindsight, the answer is obvious; just follow the money. The Bush administration had a significant financial motivation for the invasion, so they hyped it in any way they could. (Example: Nigerian yellowcake scandal) It appears that the systematic distortions caused you to lose track of the actual truth.
But I don't expect you to learn any life lessons from this. People like stories with comic book villains and if seeing Saddam as evil, omnipotent, and omniscient makes your universe make sense, whatever. [Here's where I make some insulting generalization about you, but even I have too much good taste for that.]
"And seriously, what kind of password is T1me Out. This is just pathetic."
:)
What's wrong with it? Uppercase, lowercase and numbers. Looks safe to me. If you had a thousand years to figure it out on your own, would have succeeded?
I would say it's safer than 'xXsa425Vff', because 'T1me Out' is easy to remember. That way, you don't have to ask your co-workers what it is in case you forget it. Plus, I'm sure they're changing the password from time to time. It's unlikely 'T2me Out', however.
Full Tilt
Aw, crap. Now there'll be another round of armchair security experts saying "You should turn off directory indexes!" and easily-led sysadmins actually doing it, and we'll have that many fewer sites where you can bypass the broken navigation to actually find things through the directory indexes.
Directory indexes, on a properly-run site, are a Good Thing and should be encouraged. They are and should be turned on by default in real httpd software. Anything secret that's accessible through a directory index would also be accessible by guessing the URL - so security has to be enforced by 403 Forbidden, not by "nobody will know the URL," anyway. Don't disable directory indexes unless you have a really good reason - and if you think you have a really good reason, especially if you think it has something to do with some kind of "security," then you're probably wrong.
A post on the newsworthiness of the main article is not off-topic. Should be modded back up.
Gentoo's main optimization is a social one.
... for other reasons, and they target other people. I call it Darwinian De-selection.
Mentioning Gentoo on Slashdot is guaranteed to bring out the clueless from their cubbyholes, a very worthwhile property on a site now overrun by tech wannabes. That makes article pre-filtering very easy.
Gentoo users know what properties really matter to them, but that doesn't go on the marketting/advocacy blurb. The references to speed optimization are there
And it works just great: the Gentoo forums are almost entirely free of the clueless.
Enjoy!
biological and chemical weapons aren't the sort of things you just throw out. If he disposed of them he should have had proof (disposal facilities, appropriate waste by-products, etc.) He had none of those.
Anyone looking just at the inspectors' reports would not believe that Saddam had "stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction" as was claimed by [the MI5, the Mossad, and the CIA].
Just to be accurate as possible I've updated that sentence for you.
I'm not the OP, but I believe it.
Having biological and chemical weapons lying around is a liability waiting to happen. They're hard to control, and hard to account for. (Sir, the warehouse reports that we have 5,347,761 moles of VX gas available.)
Disposing of them is environmentally hazardous. For instance, you don't really know that much about the products of the disposal reaction. Check out one story about how the disposal is problematic. (check out how many related stories there are in the side bar.)
Besides, if we needed to, how hard would it be to make more?
Let's shed all our defenses and leave ourselves vulnerable to an attack by Canadia.
I'm so sick of hearing that argument. Disarmament of nuclear weapons != complete disarmament. Even if we get rid of all our ICBMs and chemical and biological weapons, we'll still have enough nukes to destroy any other country three times over, backed up by the finest conventional military in the world.
Face it: with the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no reason for America to be spending so time and money maintaining weapons of mass destruction. We should decommission half of them and spend that money on parts of the military that actually need the attention - like the Marines and Army.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
But I don't expect you to learn any life lessons from this. People like stories with comic book villains and if seeing Saddam as evil, omnipotent, and omniscient makes your universe make sense, whatever. [Here's where I make some insulting generalization about you, but even I have too much good taste for that.]
Idle curiosity: Do you think a smart-assed remark about how you, unlike the other guy, are too good for personal attacks is something other than a personal attack?
What, you thought that they were going to go in there with guns blazing and then, when there is no government or law left, just leave town?
The plan to establish a democratic government in Iraq was a part of the plan from the start. And now it's just what they have left to do.
Did the president pick the joint chiefs and the top-level CIA people? (serious question, I don't know off the top of my head).
Not everyone who has the president's ear is appointed by him. He showed some bad judgment prior to the invasion and obviously some of his appointees were poor picks given our post-9/11 hindsight. My point is that there wasn't a crystal-clear picture either way prior to invasion, and Bush's vision was even more filtered because those he most trusted were unwilling or unable to tell him the whole story.
Iraq was big stupid mess from day one, no doubt about that. But let's not try to paint the whole administration as malicious warmongering tyrants when in all reality they're just inept shoot-from-the-hip bureaucrats.
The sad thing is, I really don't believe we'd have been much better with either of our presidential alternatives: I think Gore would have found a completely different way to bungle things after 9/11 and make someone miserable (probably us) and Kerry would probably have really fouled up the occupation...yes, even more than Bush.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Iraq did 9/11? Who cares. Saddam gone is good for the world dudes. Just ask the Saudis how they feel about it....
Well using 9/11 to invade Iraq isn't really that great of a cause; if you had so many good reasons, why did Bush try to link Saddam to 9/11? Just use one of the many good reasons already there.
As far as asking what the Saudis think, I really don't give a shit what they think. When a government can arrest and kill a woman because you saw her ankle, I don't really care if that government feels "safe" or not.
This is utter and completely unmitigated nonsense. 'We' most certainly did NOT all know that Iraq had WMDs. In fact most of the people in the world except those systematically misinformed by the American Media were pretty sure Iraq did not have such weapons. That's why (unlike Afghanistan) the US was largely unable to cajole, extort, intimidate, bribe, or con any major country except Britain into strongly supporting the invasion of Iraq. The 'Coalition" had less than 50 members. Many of them have no meaningful presence and the majority of them are places like Palau and Moldova with GDPs smaller than South Dakota. For example, officially Turkey is a member of the coalition. But in fact, Turkdy turned down a whopping bribe to participate meaningfully in the fiasco. Even Canada -- which usually sticks with the US -- passed on this one.
There were UN inspectors on the ground from November 2002 on until they were directed to leave for their own safety just before the US invasion in March 2003. Their efforts were not being impeded. They found no sign of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or of programs to make them (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/17/iraq/ma in544280.shtml )
You should be asking why you did not know in early 2003 what most of the world knew. If you were getting your news from Fox News, that would explain part of the problem. (Surely you are not still listening to those clowns?). But that's only part of the problem.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Yawn... just another opportunity to feed the flames for all the liberals on /. Reading through all the replies that have nothing to do with the original article and just focus on bashing conservatives and the content of the stories run by the network proves my point. It's getting old guys/gals... really old.
In fact, the victory over Saddam's forces and the effort to remove him from power was a cakewalk. It's keeping order in the aftermath that's proving difficult.
33% of Fox viewers said that the U.S. had actually physically found WMDs in the course of the invasion
Unfortunately, the issue is not as black and white as the pundits on either side would like you to believe. There is, unfortunately, some wiggle room that gets used to support either one side or the other depending upon the speaker. The problem lies in the strictness of one's definition of WMDs and the categorization by some people of certain chemical weapons as WMDs despite the fact that such weapons are orders or magnitude less destructive than say the nuclear weapons that they are grouped with. Now, having said that it *is* true that US forces in Iraq have, from time to time, come across the odd Artillery shell filled with mustard or even a binary form of sarin in one case (used as a roadside bomb and a couple of US soldiers experienced minor symptoms, but no deaths). At best one could say that such finds are execeedingly rare and do not in and of themselves constitute evidence of a vast and active program on the part of Saddam to develop and use these weapons in the years immediately prior to the invasion. However, proof is proof and if even one shell is found then the number of "WMDs" was not zero and that is why the pundits continue arguing the points. This is splitting hairs maybe but if one argues that there were absolutely *no* WMDs in Iraq prior to the invasion then strictly speaking that person would be wrong. The problem lies in the use of absolutes in argumentation where even one counter-example disproves the argument.
You make a very good point.
North Korea is also part of the "Axis of Evil". However they have WMD's and some pretty nasty long range missiles. They may not be able to strike The US, but they could devastate South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. We keep begging North Korea to please, pretty please, come to the negotiating table. No talk of invasion there.
Sadam complied with the U.N. inspections we demanded. Grudgingly but he complied. He ended his weapons programs and allowed us and our allies to control two thirds of his air space. (All of this had to be forced on him, but he complied).
So the moral of the story?
If you are an evil dictatorship, do not comply with The US and its allies. Build up your arsenal and become as powerfull and as dangerous as possible. The US only invades weaklings. The US begs for negotiations with the dangerous crackpots.
I believe Iran watched all of this unfold. The way Sadam and Iraq complied, and were rewarded with invasion. The way North Korea refused to comply and became more dangerous, and gets more and more aid on its terms.
This is why Iran has restarted its nuclear program.
Pretty good foreign policy we have, huh?
Rotting shells from the iraq-iran conflict is not at all why Bush claimed to go to war. playing them up to be "WMDs found in Iraq" is willful ignorance. Removing the context from the claim is as good as lying. Again.
This is like the local police saying 'We're going to raid every home in your town because of illegal arms.' They end up finding a broken revolver pistol from the 50s buried in a garbage pile. Claiming 'SEE THEY FOUND GUNS' is being a complete idiot.
Because he has no self-interest in getting deposed.
Nice typo. Confusing a Democratic candidate with Al Quaeda's head demagogue? Apropos, given we're talking about Fox.
Directory listing was once a delightful part of web browsing. There is no more efficient way of finding files.
But now, one after one, sites which do not restrict directory listing are disappearing forever.
Why? Because of snotty punk assholes like "anonymous reader", who stumble upon some quasi-personal file (the same file six dozen other individuals saw but then respectfully moved on from before him) then BITCH and BLATHER about it repeatedly until everybody is made to know just how pathetically COOL HE IS for having found it.
Iraq was big stupid mess from day one, no doubt about that. But let's not try to paint the whole administration as malicious warmongering tyrants when in all reality they're just inept shoot-from-the-hip bureaucrats.
How about we actually pay attention instead of your course of ignore all the facts to try and excuse the administration for their premeditated malicious actions?
Go read the 2000 paper by the Project For a New American Century titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" signed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, George Bush Senior and many other members of Bush's original administration and hangers on. Pay attention to the parts where they talk about their plan to invade Iraq to "ensure future US economic world domination in the coming century", their understanding that the American people wouldn't buy their bullshit, so they would need to hope for an attack on the US on the level of Pearl Harbor which they could then misuse as an excuse to invade Iraq.
How about you stop talking about the subject when you obviously don't know a damn thing about it since you couldn't even be bothered to read the position papers published by the very people you're attempting to defend.
Think about how stupid that makes you to do something so completely ridiculous.
In short, since their own published plans paint them as exactly malicious warmongering tyrants how about you stop making up complete nonsense in order to defend them from their own fucking words which you never even read?
That would actually be the sane, reasonable position which is pretty much diametrically opposed to your own.
"The sad thing is, I really don't believe we'd have been much better with either of our presidential alternatives: I think Gore would have found a completely different way to bungle things after 9/11 and make someone miserable (probably us) and Kerry would probably have really fouled up the occupation...yes, even more than Bush."
You can't go to war with the President you'd like to have, only the one you've got.
In all seriousness, I know this is just an opinion but what could you possibly base this on?
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I know that I will get flamed for this but it is the truth. What you've described is not "Weapons of Mass Destruction". I can claim some expertise here as I personally helped construct America's nuclear arsenal; I worked on Harpoon, Peacekeeper and the Navy Standard Missile among others.
What you've described is a sad, pathetic attempt at a weapons system (gas) that's been obsolete for nearly a century and a piece of scientific equipment (a centrifuge).
That's not WMD, by any stretch. You could release all that gas in Washington DC on a busy workday and there'd be a few dozen casualties. An equal volume of dynamite or amatol could do more damage (though in either case delivery would be extremely difficult, since placement would be critical).
I am not intending to flame you, merely to correct you. "Mass Destruction" is not something that any weapon Saddam ever possessed could inflict. He wanted to build superguns and buy nuclear technology, but was prevented from doing so long before Bush II's invasion.