EXPOSED! Top Hacker Secrets...

Management Services, Summer 2007 by Macleod, Calum

Protection

This leads to another question I am commonly asked: why do most enterprises leave their privileged passwords, the keys to their kingdom, open and unmanaged? The reason is simple: manually changing these codes is extremely time-consuming, so these back doors generally stay open. Visit professional hacker sites, and their biggest complaint about script kiddies is not that they exist... but that once these amateurs do something flagrant and dumb with privileged passwords, these wonderful secret passages into a company's data get closed to the professionals.

Of course there are automated ways to securely change privileged passwords, and to tie an individual ID to a shared one - this very software is now being used by many security savvy enterprises around the world. However until these solutions become standard tools in most enterprises, I'd keep a close eye on the folks around you. You never know who is privileged to YOUR information!