Ride the Lightning

Hawaii’s Missile Alert Agency Suffers ‘Password on Post-It’ Public Embarrassment

January 24, 2018

Bitdefender's Hot for Security blog was thrown a soft ball last week, when a photo surfaced from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HEMA), which famously issued a false alert on January 13th about a ballistic missile heading to Hawaii. As the post notes, the false alarm was caused by a worker who was supposed to send an internal test but mistakenly chose the wrong menu item. HEMA, as everyone has noted, needs a few more safeguards in place before alerts go out.

But oh boy, how could one resist penning a post on a photo which shows the smiling face of Jeffrey Wong, HEMA's operations officer, in front of a bank of computer screens. One computer is adorned by a Post-in note which appears to say: "Password Warningpoint2".

We don't know precisely what that password is for but that sticky note sure says a lot of about the state of security practices at HEMA. Tsk, tsk. With or without cameras nosing about, Post-its with passwords should be verboten!

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