A Government Watchdog Spent $15,000 To Crack a Federal Agency's Passwords In Minutes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A government watchdog has published a scathing rebuke of the Department of the Interior's cybersecurity posture, finding it was able to crack thousands of employee user accounts because the department's security policies allow easily guessable passwords like 'Password1234'. The report by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, tasked with oversight of the U.S. executive agency that manages the country's federal land, national parks and a budget of billions of dollars, said that the department's reliance on passwords as the sole way of protecting some of its most important systems and employees' user accounts has bucked nearly two decades of the government's own cybersecurity guidance of mandating stronger two-factor authentication. It concludes that poor password policies puts the department at risk of a breach that could lead to a "high probability" of massive disruption to its operations. The inspector general's office said it launched its investigation after a previous test of the agency's cybersecurity defenses found lax password policies and requirements across the Department of the Interior's dozen-plus agencies and bureaus. The aim this time around was to determine if the department's security defenses were enough to block the use of stolen and recovered passwords. [...] To make their point, the watchdog spent less than $15,000 on building a password-cracking rig -- a setup of a high-performance computer or several chained together -- with the computing power designed to take on complex mathematical tasks, like recovering hashed passwords. Within the first 90 minutes, the watchdog was able to recover nearly 14,000 employee passwords, or about 16% of all department accounts, including passwords like 'Polar_bear65' and 'Nationalparks2014!'. The watchdog also recovered hundreds of accounts belonging to senior government employees and other accounts with elevated security privileges for accessing sensitive data and systems. Another 4,200 hashed passwords were cracked over an additional eight weeks of testing. [...] The watchdog said it curated its own custom wordlist for cracking the department's passwords from dictionaries in multiple languages, as well as U.S. government terminology, pop culture references, and other publicly available lists of hashed passwords collected from past data breaches. By doing so, the watchdog demonstrated that a well-resourced cybercriminal could have cracked the department's passwords at a similar rate, the report said. The watchdog found that close to 5% of all active user account passwords were based on some variation of the word "password" and that the department did not "timely" wind down inactive or unused user accounts, leaving at least 6,000 user accounts vulnerable to compromise. The report also criticized the Department of the Interior for "not consistently" implementing or enforcing two-factor authentication, where users are required to enter a code from a device that they physically own to prevent attackers from logging in using just a stolen password.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.