Published in News

Dutch ISP gives passwords to hackers

by on06 July 2012



Well it might as well have


A daft Dutch ISP has all but been giving away access to its customer's accounts.

KPN has found a major security flaw  in that its usernames were easy to guess because it was comprised of the persons zipcode + street address. If that were not bad enough, it gave all its customers same default password of 'welkom01'.

While a customers account management page has an option to change the password, more than 140,000 users never did. Apparently anyone with minimal effort could log onto the account management of business ADSL subscribers. The account management page could have given attackers access to peoples accounts and the abilities to change things in such a way that it was nearly impossible for the real owner to fix.

KPN has since changed all the passwords of the 140,000 customers with weak passwords, so that should keep the hackers happy. The company insists that no one has been hacked. We guess the hackers would have not assumed that any ISP could be that bonkers.

Rate this item
(0 votes)