Equifax had 'admin' as login and password in Argentina

[nitpicker]

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41257576

Equifax had 'admin' as login and password in Argentina

13 September 2017

From the section Technology

The credit report provider Equifax has been accused of a fresh data security breach, this time affecting its Argentine operations. Cyber-crime blogger Brian Krebs said that an online employee tool used in the country could be accessed by typing "admin" as both a login and password. He added that this gave access to records that included thousands of customers' national identity numbers.
(snip)

After being notified of the latest breach, Equifax temporarily shut the affected website.
(snip)

Mr Krebs wrote that the Argentine matter involved Equifax's local business Veraz. Specifically, a web application - referred to as Ayuda, the Spanish for "help" - appears to have been weakly guarded. "[It] was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: admin/admin," wrote Mr Krebs.

The discovery was made by the US cyber-security firm Hold Security, which Mr Krebs advises. Its researchers explored the portal and within found a list of more 100 Argentina-based employees, the blogger disclosed. Using this list they were able to uncover the workers' company usernames and passwords, which turned out to be matching words in each instance. Each example amounted to either solely the worker's last name or a combination of their surname and their first initial, which made them fairly easy to guess anyway, Mr Krebs added.

"But wait, it gets worse," he blogged. "From the main page of the Equifax.com.ar employee portal was a listing of some 715 pages worth of complaints and disputes filed by Argentinians who had at one point over the past decade contacted Equifax via fax, phone or email to dispute issues with their credit reports. The site also lists each person's DNI [documento nacional de identidad]- the Argentinian equivalent of the social security number - again, in plain text." All told, there were more than 14,000 such records, Mr Krebs said, concluding that the firm had been "sloppy".
(snip)

[temporary311]

1. Did they hire Skroob to run their security?

[Warren DeMontague]

2. ...