The Man Who Hacked the Bank of France
First time accepted submitter David Off writes "In 2008 a Skype user looking for cheap rate gateway numbers found himself connected to the Bank of France where he was asked for a password. He typed 1 2 3 4 5 6 and found himself connected to their computer system. The intrusion was rapidly detected but led to the system being frozen for 48 hours as a security measure. Two years of extensive international police inquiries eventually traced the 37-year-old unemployed Breton despite the fact he'd used his real address when he registered with Skype. The man was found not guilty in court today (Original, in French) of maliciously breaking into the bank."
i have the same combination on my luggage!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
and the French bank raised its arms in defeat and let him right on in to loot and pillage.
At high-school, someone set a network share as IE's homepage and when I logged in and launched IE I got in trouble for it.
Oh, and permissions weren't even properly configured on the share, but they could read logs apparently.
In the US I think we'd have class action lawyers going after them immediately for lack of security due diligence. They would deserve it, too.
What's the EU equivalent action?
Not only they stole all my money, they stole my secret password too. 1 2 3 4 5 6 is mine. Now go away thieves. I am not giving it back to you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I guess "Original, in French" should have warned me
Ha! Another chapter in great security waitasec, that's my password, too...
I remember back when some clowns in Milwaukee , the 414's, who wanted to sell their story to Hollywood for a movie, books, etcs. All they did was use default passwords on DEC systems to log in ([1,2] was SYSTEM unless you changed it on first day.) Even our Digital field techs would set the Field Service operator account password to DECAPR, DECMAY or whatever the month was.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Do you have a licence for your minky?"
NSFW photo in sidebar, thanks to Femen.
. . . .that's the same password I always use????? I knew I should have banked with the Bank of France!
This also reminds me of the time you were at band camp and stuck a flute in your asshole.
This guy should get a meddle for showing stupid bank behaviour all that security and what ? ......medicinal compounds.....
hahaha
lily the pink - the saviour of the human race
The idiot that initially typed in that password should be the one charged in this matter. It would have been more secure with 'Joshua' or 'CPE1704TKS'.
And yes, I am being sarcastic. Those passwords suck too.
Luggage is four numbers. You cannot have six numbers.
Sure it is. You just start working backwards after you reach the fourth number.
It's a brilliantly easy way to remember
1265
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why would you give someone a Pink Floyd album for that?
The idiot that initially typed in that password should be the one charged in this matter. It would have been more secure with 'Joshua' or 'CPE1704TKS'.
And yes, I am being sarcastic. Those passwords suck too.
Apparently it's not an issue if you leave the door open, but it is if someone stumbles in.
In the United States, he'd have been sentenced to at least five years in federal prison -- where he'd be subject to rape and torture (solitary confinement), often at the hands of a private corporation.
Maybe they expected all attempts would be foiled by eternal debates on the meaning of each digit and whether they really existed or not. If so, (Infinity ^6) is pretty strong and they were probably on to something, at least existentially.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
If this is "hacking" then opening an unlocked front door by turning the handle is lock-picking
FIRST POST!
Maybe it was a random 6 character password from the entire UTF16 space?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
That article needs to be marked NSFW. Some of the side advertisements have nudity in them.
But more importantly, did you hear the Femen have landed in Paris?!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The idiot that initially typed in that password should be the one charged in this matter. It would have been more secure with 'Joshua' or 'CPE1704TKS'
Ah, but in the book, it was Joshua 5 , much more secure...
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
The lesson to be gained from this is:
Never hire someone who has a degree.
Their heads are wedged up their asses, and held in place with sheets of parchment.
A note to Timothy
> from the whereas-6-5-4-3-2-1-would-have-stopped-him dept.
actually 654321 was an alternative password that also worked !
I am sure that once he hack in he already had a saucerful of secrets.
a man enters a bank system in mere minutes. the police figure finds that man... in 2 years lmao.
Just knowing the article (sidebar?) is NSFW probably resulted in an order or magnitude more /.ers clicking through the link.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well, at least he didn't use '12345'. But he could have put in a bit more effort and used '1234567'...
Shit, that is the only reason I clicked on the french link, it's not like I can understand the language.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
but simply entering a password is NOT hacking . . . particularly when it has not been set. And before any one says RTFM . . . . OMG WTH is up with that translation??
Ah, but in the book, it was Joshua 5 , much more secure...
Your sarcasm would be warranted, if he actually used a password cracker on the password. Since all he actually did was guess it, that password almost as effective as 8 random characters would have been.
But the man was asked to give a password for HIS new login.
The system accepted 123456 (silly password for him to use, but if this was just to get in to see what rate he'd get then cancel, not a problem), but then changed his login credentials to one that gave him admin rights.
This is like opening the door on your own car and then it openeing, you driving off and then discovering that, despite a supposedly unique id and unlock, you have driven away with a bank managers own car with a sack full of money on the back seat, then being charged with bank robbery.
The original password was "correct horse battery staple" but somebody published it.
Read in French : http://www.pcinpact.com/news/73975-non-systeme-informatique-banque-france-na-pas-ete-pirate.htm
He phoned to a technical service used a bad code that resulted an alarm.
Due to this overrated alarm the site was closed during 48h...
After a momentary lapse of reason.
(And a nice pair of animals obscured by clouds hitting the wall like the delicate sound of thunder)
...they carried him!
Their women are all B cups. :(
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Perhaps the password was 123,456 and came from a random number generator.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I can tell you're one of the people who simple don't get the IE/Apache "do not track" square dance.
If the client has no ability to suppress the password screen, it's not much different than Microsoft setting a global "do not track" attribute that was intended to reflect an explicitly activated user preference, which renders it meaningless.
The closest you can come with many software packages to explicitly leave the door ajar (since you can't disable the password screen completely) is to set the password to 123456 or ftp. The later is considered obscure.
Among those with strong presumptions of security competence, typing 123456 is the moral equivalent to checking whether This Door Is Intentionally Left Ajar
Among those with no presumptions of security competence, no signal exists which reflects end-user discretion. This of course soon degenerates to the tyrany of the social machine. Check out the Barry Schwartz TED talk if you don't believe me for the episode on Mike's Hard Lemonade. Social services terrorized the child and they all knew (or strongly suspected) that it was all a big mistake.
That just goes to show that random just isn't good enough. I read a study once that said that more than 40% of random passwords are weaker than an average password of that length.
Some people just need to be shot. ..And how exactly does it take two years to tack down a suspect that used absolutely no methods to hide his tracks?
Where've you been the past few years? Banks can't do anything wrong, ever. And if they do, we get to pay for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
they're actually ukranian women.
Highlighting stupidity is proper. No wonder Asia won it.
I know that truth is not really popular around Slashdot, but nothing was actually hacked, as said here
A software alarm popped up for unauthorized login and that's all. It's just that it looked like a hack attempt of a critical national institution.
BTW, looking at the comments, it seems like people did not understand that Banque de France is not a real bank. It's a national administration, just printing money, loaning money to banks and insurance for collateral and managing over-indebtedness.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
... thern two combinations work on 25% of all Luxemburgish bank servers:
telindus
password
The reason is, that there is a company called Telindus, that has installed about 50% of all Luxemburgish banking servers.
And he told me, that after coming back in the following years, 50% of the servers they installed, still had the default password. Which is one of the two above.
The only problem is finding one that is accessible from the Internet.
Have fun. ^^
1 2 3 4 5 6 does not seem to be the actual code (source in french : http://www.pcinpact.com/news/73975-non-systeme-informatique-banque-france-na-pas-ete-pirate.htm), just what the guy typed in.
While looking for the non-premium equivalent of some premium phone numbers (which he admits to), the guy randomly dialed a phone service provided by Bank of France to a limited number of banks and insurance companies for information about indeptedness.
The guy heard a recorded voice asking for a code, tried the sequence of numbers and got nothing, so he just hung and continued doing whatever he was doing.
Note that the recorded message was not saying what the phone service was for or who provided it, so the guy tried to get in just out of curiosity. While typing tht numbers, the guy certainly did not expect such a shitstorm to fall upon him.
Typing in a bad code triggered a security alarm at Bank of France, which went paranoid about it, shut down its systems for two days trying to figure out what happened and reported the incident to the police, which just went as crazy and chased the guy. Somehow that took them two years, when the guy never hid his identity!
The AFP article is full of errors (not unusual for them) and other journalists just paraphrased it without checking the information, which drove to many bad news articles.
Oh, and Bank of France is not a "bank", it's the national reserve (like the Fed in USA).
Actually, Joshua was just the login name, and got him in *without any password*.
Here is what most probably happened (investigation is underway, so we can't be sure) :
In fact the guy entered a wrong password and wasn't given access to anything.
However his action triggered an intrusion alert and as a result the system was shut down for two days as a safety measure. Time to understand what happened.
Moreover, only an outsourced call center was shut down.
Source (in French) : http://www.pcinpact.com/news/73975-non-systeme-informatique-banque-france-na-pas-ete-pirate.htm
Really??? Two years to find him when he used his real address on his skype account??? What kind of brain dead losers were investigating this "crime"??? No money stolen, no damage done, the only real crime I see is that the bank's security is so lax they are using such pathetic passwords. They should pay this guy a substancial consulting fee for bringing this security flaw to their attention, and arrest the bank's system administrator for incompetence.
not found guilty of failing to secure everyones goodies and assets in a way befitting a bank?
you know round here you can get a fine for not locking your car since you're inviting thieves like hey come on in guys according to ze law.
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?