Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

”Finally, the company should have enforced a strong password policy that would have prevented our heroes from finding dozens of accounts with “winter2023!” as the password.”

Capitalize that “w”, and you’ve got a password that will pass most PWD policies. Why do they think it was “winter2023!” to begin with? In 90 days when the PWD expires, well, it will be spring of the next year, so…

The better idea is to require passwords with some real entropy, and get rid of expiring passwords. It’s not 1999 anymore.

Being overly suspicious of everyone is a terrible way to live. Maintenance should have the autonomy to do as they did here - and security correctly followed up. The right response should only be technical imo. A meeting room should not lead to this level of network access.

Maintenance employees are the weakest link. They aren't paid much and don't believe anything is important.

Be nice to them and they'll be nice to you back.

The company also should have restricted network access to the port in the conference room so that an unknown device like a Raspberry Pi could not make an Ethernet connection from that spot

Bad take - the actual problem is that there was a trusted network in the first place. This kind of network access control is trivial to bypass, and trusted devices can get compromised.

What always gets me about these red team attacks is the same thing that gets me about internal phishing test emails.

My company sent an internal phishing test last week. Several people immediately reported it to a cybersecurity engineer, posted about it in Slack, saying they were surprised that such a sophisticated phishing attack was happening.

I too was surprised - Google is usually much better about catching these kinds of things in the GMail filter before they get through. Oh well, sometimes one slips though. Reported it and moved on

Come to learn that the only reason it made it through is because we let it through _on purpose_.

By analogy to these red team attacks: _theoretically_ someone could rent a car, pose as an employee, and set up a Raspberry Pi in the network.

But who would go to all that trouble?

Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble? Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.

The only reason this attack vector was open is because the red team stood to gain a massive benefit from succeeding in the attack. What real-world actor would go to the trouble and stand to benefit as much?

Maintenance employees are the weakest link. They aren't paid much and don't believe anything is important.

Be nice to them and they'll be nice to you back.

”Finally, the company should have enforced a strong password policy that would have prevented our heroes from finding dozens of accounts with “winter2023!” as the password.”

The better idea is to require passwords with some real entropy, and get rid of expiring passwords. It’s not 1999 anymore.

Replying to my own post: wait a minute, why are there so many accounts with the same password in the first place? Oh, because "dozens" of people are tired of changing their password every 90 days, and someone piped up on an email thread (with the subject line: "Changing passwords all the time is bullshit!", I'm sure) and said, "I just set it to $SEASON$YEAR'!'. Easy to remember, fits the policy."

And now you have a system that is far less secure than if you just ditched the expiration policy to begin with.

Expiring passwords are one of my biggest gripes, and I still see them everywhere

1. Open a web browser and do a search

2. Read until you find a sentence that you like.

3. Use it as your password

I swear if the ghouls running things had abit more decency and allowed people to actually access and controll their passkeys then that would be the future, everyone would adopt it. The experience is so nice with key pair exchange for ssh. Its just that there i have thr security of knowing exactly where my secret is and how i can manage it, its just a file and i can move it like a file

Nobody wants the risk of getting locked out because of apple and googles walled garden bullshit

Letting users pick their own passwords has always been a mistake. If passwords are needed, the system should choose them.

A better approach is to train everyone to be polite and helpfully walk the person to reception, who can arrange access.

> Maintenance should have the autonomy to do as they did

Really? We're talking about letting strangers in through the literal back door.

The company also should have restricted network access to the port in the conference room so that an unknown device like a Raspberry Pi could not make an Ethernet connection from that spot

Bad take - the actual problem is that there was a trusted network in the first place. This kind of network access control is trivial to bypass, and trusted devices can get compromised.

It's not my field, but at least at my work the network can somehow tell the difference between an authorized user and not. It is not simply using the MAC address.

A guest device connected to the ethernet port in the conference room has the same access as a device connected to the guest wifi, a staff laptop has it's usual access.

What always gets me about these red team attacks is the same thing that gets me about internal phishing test emails.

I too was surprised - Google is usually much better about catching these kinds of things in the GMail filter before they get through. Oh well, sometimes one slips though. Reported it and moved on

Come to learn that the only reason it made it through is because we let it through _on purpose_.

By analogy to these red team attacks: _theoretically_ someone could rent a car, pose as an employee, and set up a Raspberry Pi in the network.

But who would go to all that trouble?

Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble? Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.

> Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble? Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.

I've been at a company that was well targetted. I forget which group it was, but they were got into a lot of customer service sites that week; not ours, but we had some near misses. Almost got me, sent me an email from the boss with 'The blog is down' and a link ... I was checking my mail on mobile as I was out the door, but of course mobile doesn't show any useful headers like from address.

Imaginary country called Nicha can’t buy lithography machine from imaginary company called SAML. Nicha can kidnap some scientists and torture them to get all the secrets. But it’s not elegant. Nicha can pay a lot for hacking and get the result in anonymous way. I guess 8 figures can be paid easily for these secrets. With that money “red team” can launch very nice multifaceted social hacking attack.

I remember at some point Google disallowed more phishing attacks from red teams. Nothing new was being learned. They always work.

> But who would go to all that trouble?

I mean, a company I worked at had a significant amount of money stolen after the attackers spent 6 months sitting on their access waiting for the right moment to fake an (expected) reply to an email exchange. The original breach (or at least the breach of this executives account) involved a very targeted phish. When the potential payout is millions it justifies a lot of effort.

1. Open a web browser and do a search

2. Read until you find a sentence that you like.

3. Use it as your password

How about mixing up band names? Take the end of "Florence and the machine" and mix it with the start of "Rage against the machine" and you now have the totally unguessable "Rage sharing the machine". It's a different machine see?! Nobody would know that!

I like the last line of your comment

My password is now password

Not enough numbers or special characters usually.

A better approach is to train everyone to be polite and helpfully walk the person to reception, who can arrange access.

> Maintenance should have the autonomy to do as they did

Really? We're talking about letting strangers in through the literal back door.

> Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble? Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.

I remember at some point Google disallowed more phishing attacks from red teams. Nothing new was being learned. They always work.

> But who would go to all that trouble?

I like the last line of your comment

My password is now password

That's cool. Yours comes up as stars (*). Must be a HN thing.

Should have been "use it as your password"

Not enough numbers or special characters usually.

Use one specific special character/number as word separator.

I loathe two things in password requirements: special characters and not allowing spaces. C'mon, it's 2026. Require 20 characters and call it a day.

It's not my field, but at least at my work the network can somehow tell the difference between an authorized user and not. It is not simply using the MAC address.

A guest device connected to the ethernet port in the conference room has the same access as a device connected to the guest wifi, a staff laptop has it's usual access.

Probably a RADIUS server setup.

Basically staff machines get a certificate to present to the server and the server controls the network.

So, if your machine does nothing, it's on the guest vlan and has limited access. If it presents a valid certificate that network port is reassigned to the staff vlan and you get full access.

If someone leaves, you just revoke the certificate and they have guest access again.

Not rocket science once you know it :)

Probably a RADIUS server setup.

Basically staff machines get a certificate to present to the server and the server controls the network.

So, if your machine does nothing, it's on the guest vlan and has limited access. If it presents a valid certificate that network port is reassigned to the staff vlan and you get full access.

If someone leaves, you just revoke the certificate and they have guest access again.

Not rocket science once you know it :)

Still better to do that same thing (cert based auth) at the application layer instead of the network layer.

That's great when you have control of your applications. For most corporate IT you're stuck with COTS applications and whatever their built-in auth functionality is. Sure, you can probably bolt a reverse proxy in front (if you're lucky enough for it to be a web app and not a thick native code client) but you get to argue with the vendor when they refuse support because you're not using their recommended configuration.

802.1x certificate-based authentication at layer 2 is a good defense in depth strategy.

Yes, you can do it by MAC address instead but that can be changed so you can spoof a legitimate device.

Edit: oh wait, you mean have the applications check the certificate? Yes, but then you need support from the application. Does your printer do that, for example? You need to make sure everything does. You can of course do both.

802.1x certificate-based authentication at layer 2 is a good defense in depth strategy.

Yes, you can do it by MAC address instead but that can be changed so you can spoof a legitimate device.

And now you have a system that is far less secure than if you just ditched the expiration policy to begin with.

Nobody wants the risk of getting locked out because of apple and googles walled garden bullshit

Expiring passwords are one of my biggest gripes, and I still see them everywhere

Expiring passwords and length limits. Why can't my password be a 5KB long? My password manager has no limits. Are people storing them in plain text in 2026?

Due to corporate IT working its fingers into everything vaguely computer related, I now have to annually change the passwords that operators use to log onto the HMIs on my OT network (which has no connection to the greater Internet.)

That means I now get calls after hours for a couple weeks (allowing for all shifts to cycle through) from operators who are locked out of their ops stations. I can't send the password via email, obviously, and word-of-mouth is inconsistent at best. So I'm left with the sticky note under the keyboard or stuck to the monitor, which the operators won't read anyway.

My company does it to our phone passcodes. 90 days.

Letting users pick their own passwords has always been a mistake. If passwords are needed, the system should choose them.

just directly give them a post-it for their monitor

As a person with memory issues, this is a recipe for me writing a password down where somebody else can probably find it.

The The but the first The is from The Who

Should have been "use it as your password"

That's cool. Yours comes up as stars (*). Must be a HN thing.

Use one specific special character/number as word separator.

My company does it to our phone passcodes. 90 days.

just directly give them a post-it for their monitor

As a person with memory issues, this is a recipe for me writing a password down where somebody else can probably find it.

If your machine or service is connected to the Internet, 631U)VN0Onl? written on a post-it note is generally going to be better than hunter2 not written down.

but post-its are vulnerable to the wrench attack!

I loathe two things in password requirements: special characters and not allowing spaces. C'mon, it's 2026. Require 20 characters and call it a day.

Expiring passwords and length limits. Why can't my password be a 5KB long? My password manager has no limits. Are people storing them in plain text in 2026?

The The but the first The is from The Who

"password is to long, max length..."

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

And content limits. Why can't my password contain the % character? No special characters? What makes a character "special"? Why can't it contain emoji? So many password systems go to great lengths to remove potential entropy and randomness from passwords with their rules. The usual excuse is "blah blah blah legacy systems" which is not a good reason.

I ran into a website for work that would let you create a long password, but silently truncate it to 12 characters before saving. Mind boggling.

I wouldn’t trust enterprise internet security boxes to not trip on such long text fields.

If your machine or service is connected to the Internet, 631U)VN0Onl? written on a post-it note is generally going to be better than hunter2 not written down.

but post-its are vulnerable to the wrench attack!

I wouldn’t trust enterprise internet security boxes to not trip on such long text fields.

I ran into a website for work that would let you create a long password, but silently truncate it to 12 characters before saving. Mind boggling.

This is the best. Especially when the password is being autotyped by the pw manager and so you never see the truncation and now have a bad pw saved in your manager. Alongside a restrictive password policy with no ui explaining what the policy is.

This happens on some HP printers too, the web interface lets you happily enter lengthy passwords, but doesn't bother telling you it truncated the entry at 16 or 12 characters.

Blizzard/battle.net used to this (still does?), lol

"password is to long, max length..."

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I couldn't decide which sentence of Alice in Wonderland was my favorite, so I just used the full text.

Personally, I wouldn't use anything beyond ASCII in a password. I don't want encoding bugs to lock me out of my encrypted partition or bank account, thank you very much.