| Factory default, well-known, and manufacturer backdoor accounts and their associated passwords provide easy unauthorized access to systems and devices. Leaving such accounts and passwords active on a system or device makes it extremely vulnerable to attack and unauthorized access. As such, they must be removed, changed, renamed, or otherwise disabled.
Also covered by this policy are “community strings”, which act as passwords for monitoring and management of network devices and attached systems via SNMP. The universal default SNMP community strings are “public” and private” and are well known.
Default access for VTC operation, local and remote control, management, and configuration purposes is typically unrestricted or minimally protected by well-known default passwords. It has been demonstrated that not changing these passwords is the most common cause of VTC system compromise. |
