Walter Finch
IN a tale that sounds more like a grandmother’s tech error than a corporate oversight, one of Spain’s leading mobile operators suffered a shock outage due to a ‘ridiculously weak password.’
Customers of Orange España found that their internet did not work for several hours on Wednesday after hackers guessed what the password was.
The outage began in the early afternoon, with issues reported by users on social media. The company announced that it had fixed the problem by 7pm of the same day.
But the embarrassing cause only emerged the following day.
The security breach involved hackers guessing the password to Orange’s RIPE account, which is a crucial service for managing regional Internet addresses.
The password that Orange’s technical team had chosen for their RIPE account? ‘ripeadmin.’
The issue came to light when the hacker, using the alias ‘Snow’, posted an image on social media showing the login credentials for Orange’s account.
Security firm Hudson Rock said the username and ‘ridiculously weak’ password were harvested by malware that had infected an Orange computer in September.
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