National insecurity: moronic passwords

Just read about Dan Egerstad's posting of the login/password information for the e-mail accounts of a 100 different embassies and govt. offices around the world, on his "DEranged Security" blog. Holy effin' crap. Check it out. It'll pop your eyes.

DEranged Security

The blog-post itself

Slashdot's page on it.

Some of the passwords are just too funny: "temp", "123456" (Spaceballs, anyone?), "1234", "password+1", "india01", "Password", <name of the city or country that the embassy is in>... And some of the worst ones are those of the Indians. ::rolls eyes:: Fucking hilarious.

Surprisingly, there's nothing on CNN or BBC about it yet. The Indian Express and Ars Technica have it, though.

Hmmm... like "Anonymous Coward" says on /. :

Looks like the [Indian Express] took due dilligence a bit too far...

From the article:
"The email account of the Indian Ambassador to China contained details of a visit by Rajya Sabha member Arjun Sengupta to Beijing earlier this month for an ILO conference. There was also a transcript of a meeting this evening which a senior Indian official had with the Chinese Foreign Minister. Similarly, accounts of NDA and DRDO officials reveal phone numbers, commercial documents, official correspondence and personal mails."

This is probably very illegal, even if the information has been posted for all to see, actually using this info to access someone else's account should be a no-no.

This, after Egerstad himself explicitly said:

"I would like to remind everyone that using ANY of this is a serious crime and I trust that nothing here will be used, ever! If you do anyway you are a fucker, idiot, moron, lamer, scriptkiddie, criminal and obviously don’t get the point of this publishing."

Ha!