I work in IT. Most systems have laughable security. Passwords are often saved in plain text in scripts or config files. I went to a site to help out a very large provincial governmental organization move some data out of one system and into another. They sat me down with a loaner laptop and the guy logged me into his user account on the server. When I asked for escalated privileges, he told me he’d go get someone who knew the service account passwords.
After a few minutes, I started poking around on my own… And had administrative access within an hour. I could read the database (raw data), access documents, start and stop the software, plus, figured out how to get into the upstream system that fed data to this server… I was working on figuring out the software’s admin password when the guy came back. I’m sure that given some more time, I could have rooted the box because the OS hadn’t been updated in years.
I work as a pentester and Red Teamer, I can attest that even for some large companies, you always stumble upon something that’s just dumb, and completely renders their multi-million investment they are probably making into security tools and solutions worthless.
Having worked network support, the number of times I’ve been on a screen share with someone who opens an excel sheet from the share drive that holds all the root passwords for every network device they own is high. A bad actor could take down some very large companies with some simple social engineering skills.
I work in IT. Most systems have laughable security. Passwords are often saved in plain text in scripts or config files. I went to a site to help out a very large provincial governmental organization move some data out of one system and into another. They sat me down with a loaner laptop and the guy logged me into his user account on the server. When I asked for escalated privileges, he told me he’d go get someone who knew the service account passwords.
After a few minutes, I started poking around on my own… And had administrative access within an hour. I could read the database (raw data), access documents, start and stop the software, plus, figured out how to get into the upstream system that fed data to this server… I was working on figuring out the software’s admin password when the guy came back. I’m sure that given some more time, I could have rooted the box because the OS hadn’t been updated in years.
I work as a pentester and Red Teamer, I can attest that even for some large companies, you always stumble upon something that’s just dumb, and completely renders their multi-million investment they are probably making into security tools and solutions worthless.
Having worked network support, the number of times I’ve been on a screen share with someone who opens an excel sheet from the share drive that holds all the root passwords for every network device they own is high. A bad actor could take down some very large companies with some simple social engineering skills.