CISO thought he had a 'r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd' but forgot to patch
A penetration tester discovered that a law firm's CISO used the weak password 'r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd' for his administrative account. The firm had failed to patch its Windows systems against the BlueKeep vulnerability, allowing the tester to access 2,500 computers. The CISO publicly revealed his identity as the account owner when he reacted with shock to seeing his own password displayed during the security presentation.
- ▪The law firm spent approximately half a million dollars on security software but failed to patch Windows machines against the BlueKeep remote code execution vulnerability.
- ▪Pentester Joe Brinkley exploited the unpatched flaw to access 2,500 computers and found that user passwords were stored in plain text.
- ▪The CISO's account, named 'Yellow Banana', was protected by the password 'r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd', which is a leetspeak variation of 'realgoodpassword'.
- ▪During the final presentation, the CISO identified himself as the owner of the compromised account after seeing his password on the screen.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/01/ciso-thought-he-had-a-r3lg00dpw0rd-but-forgot-to-patch/5300314 |
| Publication time | Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:32:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-01T13:32:33.469Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-01T13:32:33.469Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | WdoOEWr_7Mo6 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); security CISO thought he had a 'r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd' but forgot to patch PWNED Replacing letters with symbols still doesn’t make it good. Avram Piltch Avram Piltch US EDITOR US editor Published thu 1 Oct 2026 // 14:32 UTC READ MORE Government contractor exposed path to immigration records 7 days ago Test environment let anyone access live customer data 14 days ago Dental contractor set up secret account with access to 4,000 patient records then left the company 21 days ago Terminated…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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