News By Lee Mathews Feb. 3, 2014 10:27 am
Security at the Super Bowl this year was a pretty big deal. So big, in fact, that CBS ran a piece on a groundbreaking new operations center that was set up at MetLife Stadium. In an ironic twist, their exposé broadcast the credentials of a private in-stadium Wi-Fi network to millions of viewers.
You can see it in the image above, pinned in the corner of the massive, multi-monitor display. It looks an awful lot like a WordPad document, and you’ve really got to question why it needed to be pinned to the screen like that. It’s not as though the faux-complex “welcome here” is that hard to remember.
And if there really was a concern that those who needed the password might have trouble remembering it… well, perhaps onsite IT should have been in charge of adding devices to the network.
A leak like this doesn’t necessarily lead to any unwanted access. However, since the SSID and password spread like a zombie outbreak on Twitter and numerous blogs, it’s very possible that someone inside the stadium with a smartphone or tablet could have gained access to the private network.
In a smaller setting, simply creating a new password is no big deal. At the Super Bowl, however, where this could be a network that hundreds of journalists need access to, it gets a little more complicated. When you boast about “a show of force like something in the military” and say that multiple agencies were involved in locking things down, you really need to hide your passwords from TV cameras.
Yep, they really dropped the ball there. Just like the Broncos did all night long.
More...
You can see it in the image above, pinned in the corner of the massive, multi-monitor display. It looks an awful lot like a WordPad document, and you’ve really got to question why it needed to be pinned to the screen like that. It’s not as though the faux-complex “welcome here” is that hard to remember.
And if there really was a concern that those who needed the password might have trouble remembering it… well, perhaps onsite IT should have been in charge of adding devices to the network.
A leak like this doesn’t necessarily lead to any unwanted access. However, since the SSID and password spread like a zombie outbreak on Twitter and numerous blogs, it’s very possible that someone inside the stadium with a smartphone or tablet could have gained access to the private network.
In a smaller setting, simply creating a new password is no big deal. At the Super Bowl, however, where this could be a network that hundreds of journalists need access to, it gets a little more complicated. When you boast about “a show of force like something in the military” and say that multiple agencies were involved in locking things down, you really need to hide your passwords from TV cameras.
Yep, they really dropped the ball there. Just like the Broncos did all night long.
More...
