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Hacked Syrian Officials Used '12345' As Email Password
Nominei writes "The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Syrian President, aides and staffers had their email hacked by Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of emails online. Reportedly, many of the accounts used the password '12345' (which their IT department probably warned them to change when the accounts got set up, of course)."
I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Came for this, leaving satisfied!! This thread will go to plaid soon.
Every time I go to pastebin.com and look at the hacked sites the passwords are always weak, extremely weak, virtually no one uses strong passwords.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Is this really 'hacking' when you guess the password?
Reminds me of the script-kiddie who 'hacked' into Sarah Palin's email account once he successfully guessed her password was 'popcorn'...
Wonder how he's doing in prison?
Ken
If a bunch of kids could hack into Syran government email by typing "12345", you'd imagine that at least one of the big cyberwarfare or intelligence units out there- the U.S., Israel, or China- would have thought of the same trick and has already been monitoring their communications for a while. At least you'd hope so. I'd hate to think that right now there are of a couple of NSA agents looking at each other and saying, "12345... hey, why didn't we think of that?"
Really, Why weren't these accounts configured to expire on the first login, like most default passwords?
They are not configured to expire on the first login because most users never truly log in - they tend to access the services through point-and-drool applications that have no facilities for changing the password.
And even when they do log in, it's likely with dumbed down Windows terminal progs which for unfathomable reasons close the window immediately on disconnect, so the user won't have a chance to read why he was logged out and what to do about it.
So some admins take the easy way out and don't expire the passwords, while others spend time hand-holding the users individually, and yet others pre-generate strongish passwords for the users, but have to communicate them through untrusted media.
For what it's worth, I provided a web based password change service for our technical users so they could change their passwords even if they never logged in to the servers. Within a year, and several reminders later, one out of over 300 users had used it.
tl;dr: You're seldom allowed to break the users' kneecaps when they fail to follow instructions.
Why do you insult neanderthals?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In this case, the President is an asshole, too.
Perhaps they did. Do you seriously think that: 1. they'd let /. know and that B. they'd tell Syria when they have a free pass?
Should be scored as +1, in all likelihood, true.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Or a couple of NSA agents looking at each other and saying "shit, now we can't read their email"
The password doesn't matter if your account is at a place where everything is already readable by the Man.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
They claim they have never allowed an ambush to cover up codebreaking in WWII, just the difficulty in diffusing this information in a covert way meant it did not always get to who needed it in time. From this, it can slowly snowball in retelling to generals and spies sending men into ambushes to cover their efforts, which is stragegically retarded since it is not realistic for the enemy to notice something is amiss just because they don't get lucky in ambushes. However I think people just like the weight of the supposed situation: *movie trailer voice* "the ultimate sacrifice, to protect the ultimate secret".
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem