Fox News' FTP Password Anyone?

An anonymous reader writes "While browsing around the Fox News website, I found that directory indexes are turned on. So, I started following the tree up, until I got to /admin. Eventually, I found my way into /admin/xml_parser/zdnet/, in which, there is a shell script. Seeing as it's a shell script, and I use Linux, I took a peek. Inside, is a username and password to an FTP. So, of course, I tried to login. The result? Epic fail on Fox's part. And seriously, what kind of password is T1me Out. This is just pathetic." It's already been changed of course, but that's still pretty amusing.

Wasted chance

[Mark_in_Brazil (537925)]

Dude, why didn't you look around for the bug that makes them misreport the news so horribly that a majority of FOX News viewers still believes Iraq was responsible for 9/11 and Saddam had WMDs when the US invaded?

Re:Wasted chance

[mwvdlee (775178)]

Because now we know; it was just some hacker prank.

Re:

[MindKata (957167)]

... And when they get hacked, they can get ton's of free publicity telling the whole world of the dangers of hackers... They would probably be only too happy to get hacked, for all the extra free news coverage it would get them on other networks.

Re:Wasted chance

[by Anonymous Coward]

they can get ton's of free publicity

Now, is that "ton is of free publicity", or does Mr. Ton have a lot of "of free publicity" that he could potentially give to you?

Re:Wasted chance

[niceone (992278)]

Hey, that's not a bug - it's a feature.

Re:Wasted chance

[include($dysmas) (729935)]

the usual call to RTFA ... this is from the lame "the DoD are after me for using vista" site, who approved it ffs? read the article they link to (and link directly next time, stop paying them in ads!), its an account to grab files from zdnet, not an account into fox news, does it even have write access? dont let the facts get in the way of alarmist bs tho

Re:

[jrumney (197329)]

Clinton believed they were there, because at the time Saddam was refusing to let UN inspectors do their job. By the time Bush had invaded, the UN inspectors had already been in and found nothing.

Re:

[Rakshasa Taisab (244699)]

There's also a difference between 'believing they're there' and 'going to war cause you know they're there, no matter what others think about your plans'.

North Korea

[number6x (626555)]

You make a very good point.

North Korea is also part of the "Axis of Evil". However they have WMD's and some pretty nasty long range missiles. They may not be able to strike The US, but they could devastate South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. We keep begging North Korea to please, pretty please, come to the negotiating table. No talk of invasion there.

Sadam complied with the U.N. inspections we demanded. Grudgingly but he complied. He ended his weapons programs and allowed us and our allies to control two thirds of his air space. (All of this had to be forced on him, but he complied).

So the moral of the story?

If you are an evil dictatorship, do not comply with The US and its allies. Build up your arsenal and become as powerfull and as dangerous as possible. The US only invades weaklings. The US begs for negotiations with the dangerous crackpots.

I believe Iran watched all of this unfold. The way Sadam and Iraq complied, and were rewarded with invasion. The way North Korea refused to comply and became more dangerous, and gets more and more aid on its terms.

This is why Iran has restarted its nuclear program.

Pretty good foreign policy we have, huh?

Re:

[mh1997 (1065630)]

Clinton believed they were there, because at the time Saddam was refusing to let UN inspectors do their job. By the time Bush had invaded, the UN inspectors had already been in and found nothing.

Actually, Clinton and Bush both new that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons because the USA sold them to him (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0908-08.h tm). However, what they did not know is if he still had them at the time of the invasion (although best guess is Bush did know that Saddam did not

Ditto on all accounts

[benhocking (724439)]

There was a recent podcast [thislife.org] from This American Life (hardly the bastion of conservative thought) where a (former) teenager whose job it was to spread propaganda from Saddam's government said he was afraid about what would happen when the war started because he wasn't sure whether or not his government had chemical weapons, etc. Yes, there's a difference between some teenager (even if he and his father worked for the government) and our intelligence community. Yes, fundamental flaws exist/existed in our intelligence community, partly no doubt due to our administration's tendencies to promote "yes men". Yes, there's a difference between thinking they're there and declaring that you know exactly where they are. However, I'm still going with Hanlon's razor [wikipedia.org] on this one.

Re:

[Guuge (719028)]

Anyone looking just at the inspectors' reports would not believe that Saddam had "stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction" as was claimed by some. You don't get stockpiles from "losing track of the actual truth". you don't get mass destruction from a few ancient chemical weapons.

Using the advantage of hindsight, the answer is obvious; just follow the money. The Bush administration had a significant financial motivation for the invasion, so they hyped it in any way they could. (Example: Nigerian yellowca

Re:Wasted chance

[Don853 (978535)]

But I don't expect you to learn any life lessons from this. People like stories with comic book villains and if seeing Saddam as evil, omnipotent, and omniscient makes your universe make sense, whatever. [Here's where I make some insulting generalization about you, but even I have too much good taste for that.]

Idle curiosity: Do you think a smart-assed remark about how you, unlike the other guy, are too good for personal attacks is something other than a personal attack?

Re:Wasted chance

[PFI_Optix (936301)]

Did the president pick the joint chiefs and the top-level CIA people? (serious question, I don't know off the top of my head).

Not everyone who has the president's ear is appointed by him. He showed some bad judgment prior to the invasion and obviously some of his appointees were poor picks given our post-9/11 hindsight. My point is that there wasn't a crystal-clear picture either way prior to invasion, and Bush's vision was even more filtered because those he most trusted were unwilling or unable to tell him the whole story.

Iraq was big stupid mess from day one, no doubt about that. But let's not try to paint the whole administration as malicious warmongering tyrants when in all reality they're just inept shoot-from-the-hip bureaucrats.

The sad thing is, I really don't believe we'd have been much better with either of our presidential alternatives: I think Gore would have found a completely different way to bungle things after 9/11 and make someone miserable (probably us) and Kerry would probably have really fouled up the occupation...yes, even more than Bush.

Re:

[Aexia (517457)]

After Operation Desert Fox in 1998, Hussein's remaining WMD programs were finished off.

It's rather disengenuous to cite quotes from 1998 when he did have WMD programs to justify actions taken in 2003 when he did not have any WMD programs.

Re:

[Legion303 (97901)]

"Even CLINTON believed they were there."

Yep. In 1998. Then we invaded, destroyed stockpiles, and ushered in the inspection teams.

What that has to do with GWB's claims in 2003 I don't know, but I'm sure that completely unbiased and non-partisan site you linked to has an answer.

Re:Wasted chance

[dcollins (135727)]

This isn't about believing in WMDs before the invasion. This is about believing that we found WMDs AFTER the invasion. In an October 2003 poll, for example, 7 months after the invasion, 33% of Fox viewers said that the U.S. had actually physically found WMDs in the course of the invasion. That's 10% higher than the next most confused media viewership. This is what some of us would really love to see explained by you "nothing to see here" apologists. Or else, it sounds like you still maintain that's a reasonable belief today?

http://www.americanassembler.com/issues/media/docs /Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf [americanassembler.com]

Weapons of Mass Destruction
As discussed, when respondents were asked whether the US has "found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" since the war had ended, 22% of all respondents over June-September mistakenly thought this had happened. Once again, Fox viewers were the highest with 33% having this belief. A lower 19-23% of viewers who watch ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN had the perception that the US has found WMD. Seventeen percent of those who primarily get their news from print sources had the misperception, while only 11% of those who watch PBS or listen to NPR had it.

Re:Wasted chance

[LWATCDR (28044)]

Actually the US did find small stock piles of gas agents and one centrifuge that is used to enrich uranium. Not the massive infrastructure that was claimed to be sure but that statement that NO WMD where found is also false. The claim is that the gas agents where miss placed when the Iraqis where destroying them under UN supervision.
I know that I will get flamed for this but it is the truth.

Re:Wasted chance

[smitth1276 (832902)]

We did find WMDs [breitbart.com] on multiple occassions... they were pretty much all small caches of old shells filled with mustard or sarin and which were probably were no longer effective, but it is a bit disingenuous for the pollster to take those answers and then arbitrarily say "oh, well those don't count... so Fox News viewers are dumb!". If the question was simply "Has the US found Iraqi WMDs?" then the Fox News viewers appear to be the only ones who were properly informed of those developments.

And, of course, there were also incidents where the insurgent groups got ahold of some lingering chemical weapons (mustard gas, I think) and tried to make bombs out of them--luckily, that also was old and non-effective. Those were widely reported at the time.

In other words, get off your uninformed, sanctimonious high-horse. :-)

Re:Wasted chance

[CodeBuster (516420)]

33% of Fox viewers said that the U.S. had actually physically found WMDs in the course of the invasion

Unfortunately, the issue is not as black and white as the pundits on either side would like you to believe. There is, unfortunately, some wiggle room that gets used to support either one side or the other depending upon the speaker. The problem lies in the strictness of one's definition of WMDs and the categorization by some people of certain chemical weapons as WMDs despite the fact that such weapons are orders or magnitude less destructive than say the nuclear weapons that they are grouped with. Now, having said that it *is* true that US forces in Iraq have, from time to time, come across the odd Artillery shell filled with mustard or even a binary form of sarin in one case (used as a roadside bomb and a couple of US soldiers experienced minor symptoms, but no deaths). At best one could say that such finds are execeedingly rare and do not in and of themselves constitute evidence of a vast and active program on the part of Saddam to develop and use these weapons in the years immediately prior to the invasion. However, proof is proof and if even one shell is found then the number of "WMDs" was not zero and that is why the pundits continue arguing the points. This is splitting hairs maybe but if one argues that there were absolutely *no* WMDs in Iraq prior to the invasion then strictly speaking that person would be wrong. The problem lies in the use of absolutes in argumentation where even one counter-example disproves the argument.

Re:Wasted chance

[jollyreaper (513215)]

Fox news definately has some perspective issues - but WMD's isn't one of them. Even CLINTON believed they were there. Not trying to start a war - I am just sick of hearing about WMD's, when we all thought they were there. Iraq as the cause for 9/11 though - that's a crazy concept.

No, you colossal boob, not everyone thought there were WMD's. First, don't lump chemical and biological with nuclear. Yes, I know analysts do it but I think it unfairly magnifies the threat level of the BC in NBC.

The specific charge Bush used to get our panties in a wad was nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud." Yellow cake uranium, lie. Aluminum tubes, lie. The CIA was giving Bush solid intel but he and his team refused to accept it. Cheney and his cronies cherry-picked raw intel for the most sensationalistic shit they could find, regardless of whether it was true or not.

When you say "most people assumed Saddam had WMD" you really mean "Most people assumed he had some leftover chemical or biological shit", not that he had nukes ready to strike the west in 45 minutes. The consensus before 9-11, a consensus backed by Powell, was that the US policy of Iraqi containment was working.

I'm sick of lies and lying liars. I'm sick of people who rewrite the facts to justify doing something and then rewrite history to protect themselves from that fuckup.

Re:Wasted chance

[mhall119 (1035984)]

None of the 9-11 hijackers had any connection to Iraq, and Saddam didn't care for radical Shiite Islamic Fundamentalism!

I minor detail, but the 9/11 hijackers were not shiite muslims.

If America wants to encourage countries not to proliferate, would it not make sense to disband our own arsenal?

Absolutely not! One of the best tools we have to stopping proliferation is saying the USA will use its arsenal as a deterrent force so those countries will not need their own. That is why most European countries do not have their own nuclear weapons program, because during the Cold War we used our arsenal to extend the MAD principle to protect them.

Re:Wasted chance

[Adambomb (118938)]

I minor detail, but the 9/11 hijackers were not shiite muslims.

This is one question I wish was asked more often, despite knowing the answer, is why Saudi Arabia has been untouched by agression when the largest percentage of the hijackers were Saudi. In fact the hijackers were ALL from countries with which the oil companies...er....the US is friendly with (with Egypt being the longest stretch by that definition), primarily Saudia Arabia and the UAE [wikipedia.org].

Has anyone looked at the development of Dubai over the past 10 years? or the wealth of the royal family in Saudi Arabia? Money is flowing to someone from somewhere over there that is for sure.

Now I'm not saying that Saudi's or UAE citizens are evil by default, simply that there has been absolutely 0 backlash against these regions while the US uses 9/11 to justify everything else it has been doing everywhere else.

Wheres the puzzled slightly-tilted looks of hwhaaa?

Re:Wasted chance

[good soldier svejk (571730)]

Yes, Saddam occasionally would kick the U.N. inspectors out for a few weeks

Actually that isn't true. Saddam never expelled the UN inspectors. UNSCOM was expelled from Iraq in 1998, but it was Clinton who kicked them out, not Saddam. Iraq did temporarily expel American [acronym.org.uk] inspectors in 1997 after they learned that CIA infiltrators in UNSCOM had passed intelligence which the US used to facilitate a coup attempt. In response, UNSCOM chief Richard Butler withdrew all his teams to Kuwait. But the crisis was short lived and everyone was back to work in a week. Inspections limped along until December 1998, when Clinton decided his purposes were better served by bombing. [cnn.com] The US then told UNSCOM they needed to evacuate for safety reasons and Director Richard Butler happily obliged. Go back and read the news reports of the day and you will see no mention of Saddam expelling non-American UNSCOM members. That factoid developed later. Several UNSCOM officials, including director Rolf Ekeus and David Kaye, have admitted that the US illegally used the inspection program for espionage.

"As time went on, some countries, especially the US, wanted to learn more about other parts of Iraq's capacity." The US even tried to find information about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. [Rolf Ekeus, Director of UNSCOM 1991-1997, Financial Times, 7/29/03]

HaHa

[by Anonymous Coward]

You're going to jail and slashdot is getting shut down. It's a federal offense to interfere with an official government propaganda outlet.

Nice...

[x3rc3s (954149)]

Enjoy your stay in gitmo!

Changed by whom?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Now the question is, was it changed by Fox or someone else.

Great all we need.

[forgotten_my_nick (802929)]

That is all we need, months of stories how "evil hackers got into Fox network"

Followed up with "Hackers: Evil and must be stopped?" to linking hacking to Obama, a danger to your kids and finally Hackers gone wild at Spring break.

Re:

[Red Flayer (890720)]

and finally Hackers gone wild at Spring break.

If that video is similar to any of the other Spring break videos I've "heard about", I do not want to see it.

Either that, or we need to begin teaching nubile drunken 22-year-olds to hack.

Re:

[sammy baby (14909)]

You missed another possibility: that we'll be throwing beads at pasty, flabby geeks to get them to put their clothes back on.

what's wrong with T1me Out

[wheretheicegrows (996432)]

I'm not that much into security, so I hope I don't sound "pathetic", but I was wondering what's wrong with the 'T1me Out' password. I'd say all company passwords I've ever had were no harder than that, and none of them had a space in it. And honestly how many of you guys use a password like YwMCU07D?

Re:what's wrong with T1me Out

[AlHunt (982887)]

>And honestly how many of you guys use a password like YwMCU07D?

Great - now I have to go change all my passwords.

Re:what's wrong with T1me Out

[jollyreaper (513215)]

>>And honestly how many of you guys use a password like YwMCU07D?

>Great - now I have to go change all my passwords.

Don't feel bad, I had the same combination on my luggage.

Re:what's wrong with T1me Out

[DeeKayWon (155842)]

> Great - now I have to go change all my passwords.

Don't worry about it. I just did it for you.

Re:what's wrong with T1me Out

[asliarun (636603)]

I agree, and my personal experience with corporate passwords has been the same. I'm sure this would disturb security geeks at various levels (or get them salivating!), but I don't see this as a *huge* loophole since most of the systems are inside the corporate firewall anyway. IMHO, this is about as big a security threat as an employee or a contractor copying sensitive data (which the password is protecting) and trying to profit from it illegally.

A system that I was managing once started crashing, and further investigation revealed that the password of an upstream system had been changed. When we contacted the admin team of the offending application, they informed us that they had upgraded the password from 123 to the "highly secure" (in their words) 234.

Re:what's wrong with T1me Out

[ndixon (184723)]

There's nothing really wrong with the password (though a smart dictionary-based search could discover it).

There is something very wrong with writing the password down, in plain text, on a public-facing server and assuming that no-one will be able to see it.

Re:

[Opportunist (166417)]

Current "dictionary crackers" already take care of "leet speak". I.e. they do contain "words" like h8, sk8er and so on. And of course they do try single character replacements like 1 for I and 2 for Z and so on.

In other words, yes, this password was prone to be dict'ed.

Re:what's wrong with T1me Out

[Legion303 (97901)]

"And honestly how many of you guys use a password like YwMCU07D?"

Great--now you've got 8 people making the same joke.

Re:

[mewyn (663989)]

Well, the main problem with using "T1meOut" is it's very easily attacked by a weighted dictionary attack. All dictionary attacks take care of common numerical replacements and capitalization. The next issue is weight of the words. Time and out are rather common words in the english language, and even more common when used together. In the case of a full random password, or a word password with randomness interjected, it'd be a lot less crackable than "T1meOut". A much better password would be something

Re:what's wrong with T1me Out

[TodMinuit (1026042)]

Seriously, though, that's the form you should be using for passwords, especially critical ones or ones that are public-facing. Get yourself a good password manager (TealSafe, SplashID) and just keep generating new passwords for all your systems.

I think it's a moot point. Here, the password wasn't the failure. It could have been d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e and it wouldn't have made a difference.

Completely random password, whatever!

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Dictionary words with letters replaced by numbers: not enough entropy. In this case however, not even a completely random password would have saved them.

Bingo! Never, ever, ever! NEVER store a password in plaintext in a script. Not ever. That's always a huge security issue, because you never know who is going to read the file. If you need unattended logins, there's SSH, Kerberos/GSSAPI, whatever.

Not a horrible password

[BHearsum (325814)]

That password would've been satisfactory if it was kept better.

Not really going to harm Fox

[SilentChris (452960)]

In all fairness (do they even deserve it?), the password listed in the script is for ZDNet's FTP, not Fox. Still pretty embarrassing, but it's not going to hurt Fox at all (I imagine it could have hurt CNet/ZDNet). And it definitely could've hurt the relationship between both corporations' IT departments.

There seems to be a string of these lately between content aggregators. About a month ago there was that page on MS's site endorsing Linux. Turns out the content was from another site (I think, actually, CNet).

Not to say I'm not totally surprised. In this day when about 50% of someone's site is content from somebody else, it's not surprising there's snafus. I'm just waiting for the day when one of the sites leaves up SSH logins for another.

Let's see here

[by Anonymous Coward]

Random corporation has bad security: Brief blurb about how corporations should take better care of their security infrastructure in order to make sure that leaks/intrusions don't happen. Perhaps even a person or two giving advice in the form of which files to edit and what to change.

Corporation that people don't like has bad security: Note after note about how evil the company is and that they're idiots in the highest sense.

Ridiculous summary

[the computer guy nex (916959)]

1) The password has probably been around for awhile with no one guessing it. What exactly was wrong with it? Uppercase/lowercase/numbers, combination of multiple words, it is at least moderately strong.

2) Why the hell are you blaming Fox? You think the entire company sat in a conference room and decided on a security scheme and a password?

3) Why did this deserve front page news? Exploits like this are found on a daily basis, and ones much more humorous/interesting/newsworthy.

Re:Ridiculous summary

[pzs (857406)]

I'm guessing that this is an excuse to rag on Fox and bitch about the war and Dubya some more.

At least the story had "ftp" in it, making it slightly more "for nerds".

Peter

PS. I was against the war, I'm against Bush and I think Fox sucks, but even so (and as the parent post points out), this is a bit tenuous.

NEWS FLASH: Left-Wing Fascists mod parent off-topc

[E++99 (880734)]

A post on the newsworthiness of the main article is not off-topic. Should be modded back up.

4chan

[stick-boy (73731)]

this originated on 4chan.org's /b/ late last night (NSFW.) the shell script was a small script for uploading to a ziff-davis ftp server, it wasn't actually a fox ftp password (look at the directory name the shell script was found in, and i'm sure z-d appreciates this too.) also, there was an image directory that had directory listing turned on too. i didn't stick around long enough to see if any /b/tards found anything interesting in there, but i know an image dump was being made.

This is the closest Fox News will ever get...

[TheReallyMadScientis (1131215)]

...to doing 'fair and balanced' journalism.

Re:Linux Ver Security hole, fox stupidity, or both

[by Anonymous Coward]

Oh shut the fuck up, you Gentoo fanboi. If they used Gentoo, the server would still be recompiling from a kernel update six months ago. Take your Genntoo, and jam it up your ass sideways and backwards. It's 0.038% more optimized for that.