Hacked Texan Water Infrastructure Had a 3 Character Password

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/hacker-says-texas-town-used-three-character-password-secure-internet-facing-scada-system-11201

by 01PH • 15 years ago

98 44 15 years ago

threatpost.com

zephjc• 15 years ago

Was the password "H2O"?

cellis• 15 years ago

123 or abc is my guess

jarkarj• 15 years ago

"God", system administrators love to use "god". It's that whole male ego thing.

nobody31415926• 15 years ago

123? That's the same password I have on my luggage

droithomme2• 15 years ago

Many years ago I worked for a defense contractor who not only had 123abc as the password for a workstation that held secret information and was connected to the internet, but a post-it note with "password: 123abc" was kept on top of a monitor which was visible through a window from a corridor that random members of the public had access to. When I brought this up as possibly a poor security practice the reaction was anger towards me, and then moving the post-it note to the side of the monitor so it would not be visible from the window.

Steko• 15 years ago

I will put up 50 HN bucks that it was 999 set up by a Herman Cain fan.

throwaway642• 15 years ago

sounds like my bank, bank of Montreal, they only allow 4 number passwords for their e-banking shit (seriously)

onedognight2• 15 years ago

The weakness of a four character password can be mitigated somewhat by locking your account or an IP after a few failed attempts.

JoshTriplett2• 15 years ago

If you lock the account, you allow a trivial DoS. If you lock the IP, anyone with a botnet can trivially work around it. And with enough accounts, you can just scan the entire space of (possible) accounts for anyone with a particular PIN.

zheng2• 15 years ago

But I'm sure they have some sort of lockout after 3 or so tries, right?

(Unfortunately, this reads just as valid sarcastically as seriously).

jws• 15 years ago

This is great when the bank only has a few hundred accounts. Sure, it is unlikely to guess a single individual, but a thief probably doesn't care who they steal from.

Kaizyn• 15 years ago

I would think you would either NOT use online banking or find another bank.

smtf• 15 years ago

Ah. You may want to double check that:

http://www.bmo.com/home/about/banking/privacy-security/prote...

Maybe your the victim of a Phishing attack or something, for example maybe a fake site told you you had to use 4 digits.

Honestly I've heard of a lot worse then this:

http://www.bmo.com/home/about/banking/privacy-security/how-w...

throwaway642• 15 years ago

I just called my bank, to double check, and now 6 character passwords, letters and numbers are allowed, a truly massive improvement!

What i dont understand is now all bank cards in Canada have a smartcard embedded, why cant they just hand out $5 card readers and use that for ebanking, every major browser and OS supports this stuff right out of the box.

ryan-allen• 15 years ago

Does anyone else think that it's only a matter of time before IT security is going to be a regulated industry?

lucisferre2• 15 years ago

It would only work if it was regulated by people who understood IT security.

pilom2• 15 years ago

In the US, there was a relatively recent regulation of IT security in the form of Department of Defense Directive 8570. This directive requires IT security folks who work on DoD contracts to have a certification from one of the major certification authorities (think CISSP). Personally I'm not a fan of required certification for a number of reasons, but at least the DoD is trying to improve the quality of contractors working in IT security.

lawnchair_larry• 15 years ago

It's cute that they think they are trying, but CISSP really is a joke.

fredoliveira• 15 years ago

this reminds me of the movie hackers.

"Yeah but don't forget God. System operators love to use God. It's that whole male ego thing." ;-)

droithomme2• 15 years ago

There is no way to stop people from doing this sort of thing because people are infinitely creative in ways to be dumb. The solution is not to have critical infrastructure controlled over the public internet.

chrisbolt• 15 years ago

That's just another way of saying "don't employ dumb people."

kevinherron2• 15 years ago

This doesn't surprise me AT ALL. You guys wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've seen out there. Work in the industrial automation field is largely done by individuals/companies called System Integrators. Integrators are cowboys and most of the industry is an unregulated wild-west. There is a pervasive "git-er-done" attitude; nothing else matters, security included.

(I'm a developer at one of the smaller SCADA software companies.)

elithrar• 15 years ago

Amen to that. I do some work on the network side of control systems—and default passwords (or no passwords) are rampant, and often recommended under manufacturer guidelines. The last part there is the more worrisome.

crag• 15 years ago

Business phone systems are the same. Most manufactures only allow a 4 char password. Now phone systems are being hack left and right; "hackers" (more like organized crime) selling carrier service and the company gets the bill.

briandon• 15 years ago

What's stopping the SCADA software companies from taking on the integration work themselves?

kevinherron2• 15 years ago

Some of the huge guys like Rockwell and Siemens may offer integration services; I'm not 100% sure though.

But I'm guessing it's mostly because system integrators are qualified in a way a software company isn't. The scope of a project that an integrator might take on can be vast and the SCADA software is generally only one piece of the equation.

jacquesgt• 15 years ago

The big industrial automation and SCADA companies all provide some level of application engineering/system integration services. But, it's only practical to do the integration work in-house for large (millions of dollars in revenue annually or tens of millions of dollars in revenue one time) customers. Managing thousands of local teams of integrators all over the world to take on smaller jobs would be prohibitively expensive.

For smaller, "one-off" jobs, the integration work is done by distributors or by 3rd party integrators. Distributors will often do the integration for free and cover the integration cost and their profit from the discount the manufacturer gives them from list price. Most integrators do fixed-price bids for work, and may also make money from equipment markups. In both cases, there is a lot of incentive to do the minimum possible, especially since the projects tend to be poorly specified.

This is all made worse by the fact that the customers tend to be technically unsophisticated. That makes it hard for them to effectively manage projects, and hard for them to make informed judgements when selecting suppliers. Suppliers are usually picked based on personal relationships with the sales team (manufacturer's or distributor's) and the in-house engineer's familiarity with a given supplier.

Finally, the whole industrial automation industry isn't terribly glamorous. The typical problems being solved on any given job have been solved thousands of times before. The technology is often old and clunky (the most common language is called ladder logic... look it up, it's good for a laugh). Being successful requires a mixture of software, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and sales skills. Since most distributors and integrators live almost hand-to-mouth, sales skills tend to be emphasized, even among the engineers. The engineers who are good at sales find they can make more money doing sales. The ones who aren't salesy find there isn't much room for advancement and move on. I'm over-generalizing, but the overall trends don't encourage high-quality software engineering.

code_duck• 15 years ago

Indeed, while our politicians bloviate about 'terrorism' and how safe they're keeping us, this is the reality. Notable that this occurred in Texas, where the legislature would be as likely consult Jesus about the incident as a security expert. I honestly have to wonder whether our society will be going down in flames soon due to the odd combination of reliance upon and willful, resentful ignorance of knowledge that is being promoted in public culture.

freehunter• 15 years ago

Just sit in on a discussion of the business case of a new technology. "This is where the future is, we need to be where consumers/customers are, everything must be digital." So they spend $3m on a new "social" or "cloud" platform, then say "oh yeah, we don't have the budget for security monitoring or personnel to cover this platform. Roll it out anyway."

nakkiel• 15 years ago

Well, just so you know, it's not limited to your industry. The "You guys wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've seen out there" is almost instulting given what I have seen. I guess it's just anybody out there who's been in contact the real world who can say that.

But yeah, the real world kind of stinks.

beedogs• 15 years ago

It doesn't surprise me at all either. SCADA systems invariably seem to be ancient museum pieces pressed into service out of necessity and kept in service out of inertia.

The kind of shit I've seen in SCADA comms rooms blows my mind -- bare, homebrew breadboards screwed into 19" racks; SparcStations caked with dirt and grime; passwd files containing active accounts for people who are now dead.

The only thing I find surprising about any of this is that it doesn't happen every single day.

lucisferre2• 15 years ago

Given that I probably would have put "Hacked" in quotes then.

peterbotond• 15 years ago

many many years ago, when modems were king, there was a breach similar to the 3 character password, UCB... well, the rest is history. I dont remember the details precisely, probably still can be found on some news or mailing list archives.

mattdeboard2• 15 years ago

This may well be the vaguest allusion to a historical event I've ever seen.

morsch• 15 years ago

Not exactly the vaguest, probably -- a couple of years ago, the pants allusion, you know. Pretty funny & caused quite the stir in the right circles (HTE, etc.).

zheng2• 15 years ago

For those of us too young to pick up the reference, care to be slightly less opaque?

peterwwillis• 15 years ago

I'm going to say it: if people who work "in the real world" would release this stuff to an organization like the now-dead WikiLeaks or Anonymous, the bad press might put enough fear into a higher-level manager to actually audit their crappy systems for this stuff.

Also I think somebody ought to pass some tougher laws about leaving national infrastructure open to simple attacks. We can start with "3 years in prison for default passwords."

JordyB• 15 years ago

I have always wondered how weak the passwords were on things like this. It is a shame someone even put such a password on there.

DanBC• 15 years ago

Lack of clean water can cause large amounts of chaos very quickly[1]. Water infrastructure should be something that Governments want to protect.

Given that, and given weird laws about "providing help to terrorists"[2] I'm amazed that someone putting a 3 character password on something so important, and then letting it face the Internet, is not going to see jail time.

[1] See, for example, flooding in Gloucestershire, England, a few years ago. That was troublesome, but only got really bad when a local water treatment plant was flooded.

[2] At least, in the UK.

tripzilch• 15 years ago

Well, well... In between developing censoring and deep packet inspection infrastructure for Iran and Egypt (in a joint venture with Nokia) and getting their PLC control software rooted by Stuxnet, Siemens makes badly secured SCADA systems for water supplies.

Hacked Texan Water Infrastructure Had a 3 Character Password

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