Networking 101: Change the default passwords on routers fresh out of the box. That’s the message network managers should be getting when reading InformationWeek‘s interview with convicted hacker Robert Moore.
Moore, who last week began his two-year sentence in a federal prison, had pleaded guilty to consipiracy to commit computer fraud. He took part in a plan to steal VoIP services and sell them on through a separate company, reports InformationWeek.
Moore told InformationWeek: “It’s so easy. It’s so easy a caveman can do it … When you’ve got that many computers at your fingertips, you’d be surprised how many are insecure.”
The story goes on to report:
Moore said what made the hacking job so easy was that 70% of all the companies he scanned were insecure, and 45% to 50% of VoIP providers were insecure. The biggest insecurity? Default passwords.
“I’d say 85% of them were misconfigured routers. They had the default passwords on them,” said Moore. “You would not believe the number of routers that had ‘admin’ or ‘Cisco0’ as passwords on them. 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.”
Why is it that there appears to be routers out there using default passwords?
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