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Convicted VoIP Hacker Robert Moore Speaks
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Sep 26, 2007 06:35 PM
from the kind-of-thing-an-idiot-would-have-on-his-luggage dept.
from the kind-of-thing-an-idiot-would-have-on-his-luggage dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Convicted hacker Robert Moore, who will report to federal prison this week, gives his version of 'How I Did It' to InformationWeek. Breaking into 15 telecom companies and hundreds of corporations was so easy because most routers are configured with default passwords. "It's so easy a caveman can do it," Moore said. He scanned more than 6 million computers just between June and October of 2005, running 6 million scans on AT&T's network alone. 'You would not believe the number of routers that had "admin" or "Cisco0" as passwords on them,' Moore said. 'We could get full access to a Cisco box with enabled access so you can do whatever you want to the box. We also targeted Mera, a Web-based switch. It turns any computer basically into a switch so you could do the calls through it. We found the default password for it. We would take that and I'd write a scanner for Mera boxes and we'd run the password against it to try to log in, and basically we could get in almost every time. Then we'd have all sorts of information, basically the whole database, right at our fingertips.'"
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Firehose:Convicted VoIP Hacker Robert Moore Speaks by Anonymous Coward
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Geico commercial filming (Score:4, Funny)
So, not only do cavemen work in video production, they do network admin?
Re:Geico commercial filming (Score:5, Funny)
No, read more closely. He wasn't talking about cavemen in general. He was talking about one particular caveman. [wikipedia.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
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Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Here's one I do (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I had 5 routers in my neighborhood on channel 6, with default passwords.
I logged on into each and switched them to different channels.
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Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy solution - disable the product until the password is changed and intercept http connections so you can give people a helpful page saying "The default password is 'password'. This must be changed before this router/switch can be used. Click [here] to do so."
I fail to see any flaws with this solution. Also read 'The Design of Everyday Things'.
Parent
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that you get folks like SAC who set the PAL codes for all their nukes to 00000, yeah there will always be people that bypass it. But at least won't be because nobody touched it at all -- someone had to run the setup. And when users get cranky and bypass it, then it's now 100% their problem. Especially when the SOX auditors come knocking.
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he should study more (or moore) (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently Moore's law isn't quite up to snuff.
Random passwords (Score:4, Interesting)
- They must run a test suite before shipping them so it should be easy to make that tool generate a random password and assign it to the router
- You would have to print it on the router, or on a slip of paper
- If it is printed on the router itself then you could make the router's reset button go back to that password, instead of Cisco0.
Even if you don't implement that last bullet, it still seems like it would help a lot.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they mustn't. Frequently, if your production QA is good you don't do 100% testing before shipping. Random sampling is usually good enough and significantly cheaper. I can't speak to any specific router manufacturer, but this is SOP in manufacturing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Every device with an Ethernet interface has a 48-bit unique identifier built in. All such devices, in my experience, also have a sticker that displays their Ethernet address. Would it be so difficult to include, at manufacturing time, a small ROM that contained an initial password, unique to each device, and also displayed on a sticker? The additional cost of such a feature needs to be weighed against the additional security provided, but I think in some markets it would be a definite win.
The manufactu
Re:Random passwords (Score:5, Funny)
That's actually not so bad. In order to get on the wireless network to use the admin password in the first place, they would need to guess your SSID and WEP key. And everyone knows that's impossible, right?
-:sigma.SB
Parent
Ridiculous! (Score:3, Funny)
That's ridiculous. Everyone knows the most commonly used passwords are "love," "secret," and "sex." Oh and don't forget "God." It's that whole male ego thing.
Damn... (Score:4, Funny)
So easy a caveman could do it (Score:4, Insightful)
So easy a caveman could do it.
But apparently not so easy a caveman could avoid getting caught?
What ever happened to the supercool hacking-thang called "not getting caught"?
- Jesper
Re:So easy a caveman could do it (Score:5, Funny)
It could even be happening right now...
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And what is the 1st thing you do (Score:4, Informative)
Nice to know telecom companies don't have a clue.
Re:At least that "Hacker" actually used some skill (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not if he exploited it and kept it hushed up. (Score:5, Insightful)
If he told the owner about the insecurity and didn't exploit it himself, yes.
imagine what havoc he could have made if he had been malicious, or had sold the passwords to Osama....
Or if he kept it quiet and exploited it himself - stealing services and running up bills for the victimized system owners, building a business on it and pocketing money for himself and his co-conspirators.
Wait... That's what he did, isn't it?
No, he should not be congratulated. He should be convicted and punished as the thief he is.
Wait... That's what happened, isn't it?
Isn't it nice
Parent
Re:And which heads will roll? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now imagine that you want to change the passwords. You can't bring the network down or impact any current work. Networks of this size are constantly being modified. New devices added, routes being updated/refreshed. Redundancy deployed or a failure causing it to be exercised.
AND you are a business - the people making decisions don't know anything about security - the only question is "what will all this work do to make more money?" Nothing? Then don't do it.
Tracking 80,000 passwords isn't easy. During emergencies - your phone won't ring - your mother with a pace maker needs 911, not having access to the password in a switch that needs to be reconfigured manually isn't a good excuse.
Ok, 1 of those hundreds of people leave the company. Do you change all the passwords
I've never seen a switch or router guy that wasn't overworked. Just like security folks.
Anyway, just a few thoughts. It is never as simple as it seems.
BTW, I worked at the big telecom company that wasn't hacked. I've since moved to a different telecom that is constantly being hacked and in the news for it. Until a few months ago, they had laughable security standards that seemed left over from 1990 to me and a flat network. Simply stupid, but being secure is a huge undertaking that isn't just network security, as you know. Only security failures get Executive attention, sadly.
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