Dell’s Hard-Coded Fuckup: A Nation-State’s Wet Dream

Oh for fuck’s sake. Dell’s only gone and hard-coded credentials into their systems like they’re leaving cookies and milk out for Santa—except Santa is every state-sponsored hacker on the planet, and the cookies are your entire fucking network. For YEARS. We’re talking about a backdoor so obvious you could find it with a blindfold and a broken copy of Nessus.

Some absolute genius at Dell decided that embedding static, unchangeable root-level access into their support software was a “feature” rather than, you know, A GAPING SECURITY WOUND THE SIZE OF THE FUCKING MARIANA TRENCH. It’s the kind of decision that makes you wonder if their security team consists of a Roomba with “SECURITY” written on it in Sharpie.

This isn’t just a vulnerability—it’s a goddamn invitation. Every APT group from Beijing to Moscow is probably popping champagne right now. “Oh, you mean Dell built us a universal skeleton key? How thoughtful!” The article points out this affects millions of enterprise systems worldwide. That’s millions of devices that might as well have a sign saying “Property of [INSERT NATION-STATE HERE].”

Dell’s response is the usual corporate horseshit: “We take security seriously” blah blah fucking blah. If you took it seriously, you wouldn’t have shipped a product with security equivalent to a screen door on a submarine. Now they’re scrambling to patch systems while every intelligence agency with a budget is already inside, making themselves comfortable and probably redecorating your file servers with their own firmware implants.

The best part? This was discovered by some researcher who probably thought they were hallucinating when they found it. “Surely,” they thought, “a multi-billion dollar corporation wouldn’t be THIS fucking stupid.” Oh, but they are. They absolutely are. This is the same level of genius as writing your ATM PIN on your debit card.

If you’ve got Dell hardware in your environment—and who doesn’t, because some bean-counter in procurement got a hard-on for the bulk discount—you’re now officially in damage control mode. Except the damage started four years ago and you’re only just finding out about it. The nation-states aren’t coming; they’re already here, feet up on your coffee table, reading your emails.

Source: Dark Reading – Dell’s Hard-Coded Flaw: A Nation-State Goldmine

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Had a user once who complained his laptop was “too secure” because it required a password. I set it to auto-login with admin rights and taped his credit card details to the screen. He was much happier. That’s basically Dell’s security philosophy, only they did it to everyone.

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