Hacked Texan Water Infrastructure Had a 3 Character Password

Business phone systems are the same. Most manufactures only allow a 4 char password. Now phone systems are being hack left and right; "hackers" (more like organized crime) selling carrier service and the company gets the bill.

Some of the huge guys like Rockwell and Siemens may offer integration services; I'm not 100% sure though.

But I'm guessing it's mostly because system integrators are qualified in a way a software company isn't. The scope of a project that an integrator might take on can be vast and the SCADA software is generally only one piece of the equation.

The big industrial automation and SCADA companies all provide some level of application engineering/system integration services. But, it's only practical to do the integration work in-house for large (millions of dollars in revenue annually or tens of millions of dollars in revenue one time) customers. Managing thousands of local teams of integrators all over the world to take on smaller jobs would be prohibitively expensive.

For smaller, "one-off" jobs, the integration work is done by distributors or by 3rd party integrators. Distributors will often do the integration for free and cover the integration cost and their profit from the discount the manufacturer gives them from list price. Most integrators do fixed-price bids for work, and may also make money from equipment markups. In both cases, there is a lot of incentive to do the minimum possible, especially since the projects tend to be poorly specified.

This is all made worse by the fact that the customers tend to be technically unsophisticated. That makes it hard for them to effectively manage projects, and hard for them to make informed judgements when selecting suppliers. Suppliers are usually picked based on personal relationships with the sales team (manufacturer's or distributor's) and the in-house engineer's familiarity with a given supplier.

Finally, the whole industrial automation industry isn't terribly glamorous. The typical problems being solved on any given job have been solved thousands of times before. The technology is often old and clunky (the most common language is called ladder logic... look it up, it's good for a laugh). Being successful requires a mixture of software, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and sales skills. Since most distributors and integrators live almost hand-to-mouth, sales skills tend to be emphasized, even among the engineers. The engineers who are good at sales find they can make more money doing sales. The ones who aren't salesy find there isn't much room for advancement and move on. I'm over-generalizing, but the overall trends don't encourage high-quality software engineering.

Just sit in on a discussion of the business case of a new technology. "This is where the future is, we need to be where consumers/customers are, everything must be digital." So they spend $3m on a new "social" or "cloud" platform, then say "oh yeah, we don't have the budget for security monitoring or personnel to cover this platform. Roll it out anyway."

If you lock the account, you allow a trivial DoS. If you lock the IP, anyone with a botnet can trivially work around it. And with enough accounts, you can just scan the entire space of (possible) accounts for anyone with a particular PIN.

This is great when the bank only has a few hundred accounts. Sure, it is unlikely to guess a single individual, but a thief probably doesn't care who they steal from.

I just called my bank, to double check, and now 6 character passwords, letters and numbers are allowed, a truly massive improvement!

What i dont understand is now all bank cards in Canada have a smartcard embedded, why cant they just hand out $5 card readers and use that for ebanking, every major browser and OS supports this stuff right out of the box.

"God", system administrators love to use "god". It's that whole male ego thing.

123? That's the same password I have on my luggage

Many years ago I worked for a defense contractor who not only had 123abc as the password for a workstation that held secret information and was connected to the internet, but a post-it note with "password: 123abc" was kept on top of a monitor which was visible through a window from a corridor that random members of the public had access to. When I brought this up as possibly a poor security practice the reaction was anger towards me, and then moving the post-it note to the side of the monitor so it would not be visible from the window.

It's cute that they think they are trying, but CISSP really is a joke.

Not exactly the vaguest, probably -- a couple of years ago, the pants allusion, you know. Pretty funny & caused quite the stir in the right circles (HTE, etc.).