Easy to retrieve passwords from thousands of Supermicro servers

Thousands of servers that have a Supermicro motherboard are vulnerable to a critical security problem. This makes it easy to retrieve administrators’ passwords.

The vulnerability concerns the so-called baseboard management controller, which can be used to monitor the physical status of servers. This includes, for example, viewing server temperatures and fan speeds.

Supermicro’s bmc contains a binary file that stores the passwords for remote logins as plain text. That file can be easily downloaded by connecting to port 49152, researchers from CARI.net and security institute Sans confirm.

During a scan, the CARI.net researchers found nearly 32,000 servers where the passwords could be viewed. In more than three thousand cases, the password turned out to consist of the standard combination. This includes passwords that contain ‘password’. Supermicro has not yet commented on the security issue.