Daily Archives: January 13, 2016

US spy chief’s personal accounts hacked

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US spy chief James Clapper’s personal online accounts have been hacked, his office confirmed Tuesday, a few months after CIA director John Brennan suffered a similar attack.

Clapper’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed the hack but refused to provide details.

“We are aware of the matter and we reported it to the appropriate authorities,” spokesman Brian Hale told AFP.

A teen hacker who goes by “Cracka” claimed to have hacked Clapper’s home telephone and Internet accounts, his personal email, and his wife’s Yahoo email, online magazine Motherboard reported.

Source: US spy chief’s personal accounts hacked

Cisco forgot its own passwords for seven weeks

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Someone’s palm is digging a hole into their face at Cisco, which has just admitted it shipped a bunch of servers with the wrong default password.

“A number of C-Series servers have shipped to customers with a non-standard default password which prevents access to the Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) unless the configured password is provided,” the Borg says in a new Field Notice.

Kit made between between November 17, 2015 and January 6, 2016 was misconfigured. If you get one and try to get it working with Cisco’s default admin password – “password” – you’ll look like a very silly sysadmin indeed.

The fault is all Cisco’s: for reasons it’s not explaining, the firm instead set the default password to “Cisco1234”.

Source: Cisco forgot its own passwords for seven weeks

Fortinet tries to explain weird SSH ‘backdoor’ discovered in firewalls, calls it “management authentication issue”

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Anyone who uses this script against vulnerable firewalls will gain administrator-level command-line access to the equipment. After some outcry on Twitter and beyond, Fortinet responded by saying it has already killed off the dodgy login system.

“This issue was resolved and a patch was made available in July 2014 as part of Fortinet’s commitment to ensuring the quality and integrity of our codebase,” a spokeswoman told El Reg.

“This was not a ‘backdoor’ vulnerability issue but rather a management authentication issue. The issue was identified by our product security team as part of their regular review and testing efforts. After careful analysis and investigation, we were able to verify this issue was not due to any malicious activity by any party, internal or external.”

In a security advisory dated today, Fortinet explained that the issue affects FortiOS versions 4.3.0 to 4.3.16 and 5.0.0 to 5.0.7. This covers FortiOS builds from between November 2012 and July 2014, and it’s certainly possible that some slack IT admins haven’t updated the software since then.

Source: Fortinet tries to explain weird SSH ‘backdoor’ discovered in firewalls

A rose by any other name!