20 Nov
2021
20 Nov
'21
8:08 a.m.
Most of the hundreds (thousands?) of Unix systems running in Bell Labs seemed to have well
guarded root passwords. There was always social engineering, like Rob mentioned. And, of
course, setuid root exploits that I enjoyed.
Another anectdote:
Sometime around 1975 the NSA became a proud owner of a Unix system. They rewrote a whole
bunch. And invited Ken to visit. He surreptitiously observed someone logging into the
console as root. A bit later, they asked him to have a seat and try to break in. He sat
down and logged in as root. Apparently he was very good at observing keystrokes. He had to
explain himself. I wonder if they would’ve let him leave otherwise.
- Alan
On Nov 19, 2021, at 8:32 PM, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
My recollection from the 70s is that the default root password on
all UNIX systems was "foo" and almost nobody ever changed it.