They Hack Because They Can
Summary: A hacker defaced electronic highway signs in at least three North Carolina locations and in two other states between May 27 and June 2, 2014, rewording them to read "Hack by Sun Hacker" and leaving a Twitter invitation to chat. An MS-ISAC notice obtained by KrebsOnSecurity attributed the incidents to weak SNMP community strings, Telnet port 23 with a simple password cracker, and changed modem passwords that forced technicians to restore factory defaults, and profiled the actor as a Saudi Arabian individual also linked to SQL injection compromises of foreign databases.
Key Takeaway: The MS-ISAC report tied the timing to the May 27, 2014 release of the video game Watch Dogs and assessed that a small percentage of its players would experiment against state and Department of Transportation systems, meaning the exposure is not a single actor but a pool of curious ones. The same notice found the signs were reachable through default-grade credentials, so the barrier between a bored script kiddie and a live highway message board was a weak password.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- OT / ICS & Critical Infrastructure
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