To be fair, what else could they do with that keyboard.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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That's like a huge key at least with 2.5x the size of a normal using USB C to estimate the ratio.
Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password
The more scary part in this story is that the government stores your passwords in plain text!
So basically ANYONE with access to the database can steal your credentials, including employees, the government and any authorities.
Never re-use passwords.
Every place I have worked, most of HR and like half of finance/accounting has access to your social security number, full address and phone number. Sometimes even the password and security questions you used for whatever BS portal they made you setup an account in.
Never heard of hashing and salting apparently
"Oh yeah we did that at the last company barbeque event. They hashed and salted all the steaks"
And why couldn’t they have done that to the student loans system?
Like JFC, they could have instantly made themselves immune from trial-by-jury anywhere in America by doing that one tiny thing.
Student loans are loans from third party lenders which are cosigned by the federal government for collateral.
Even if every government record of it were destroyed, the loan servicers would have perfect multiple ledger copies of it all.
Probably not one of the 96 databases they had :(
Peter Thiel probably has a backup copy now from doge unfortunately.
Wasn't that a premise in Mr Robot?
It was kinda the premise of Fight Club, although private sector instead of public
Back in 2015, the brothers pled guilty in Virginia to a scheme involving wire fraud and computers. Muneeb was sentenced to three years in prison, while Sohaib got two.
I'm not gonna say there were signs that these two weren't the most law abiding of citizens, buuuuut...
I briefly worked with a government client that would bring in prison laborers to collect trash. From the IT building of the tax agency.
But don't worry, they were just white collar criminals. You know, people who only went to jail for stealing... financial data... The very thing that was accessible in that building.
Genius.
I don't think that you'd be able to do much with that information as a prisoner.
Company only paid for a 7 year background check, so you mis them getting out of prison 8 years ago.
Oh I'm sure the government loved taking them, since >Half of all Politicians are corrupt fraudsters.
wire fraud
Relatives of El Nasir?
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Why were they storing passwords in plaintext in the databases?!
Pretty sure thats part of the illegal thing done by these two, no?
First time reading about government systems, eh?
Because like all critical infrastructure it was setup by somebody's kid on work experience
Or some poor guy who is setting it up, because it is a one off and just get it done project, that metastasizes into a fucking mess.
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Why not? National Safety Department of Slovak Republic (Narodny Bezpecnostny Urad) had password NBUSK123… just government things
No, that was a bit different.
login: nbusr
password: nbusr123
The K in password doesnt match Republic in the name.
Totally secure.
It's like leaving your car door unlocked in a bad neighborhood so your window doesn't get smashed for the $.36 in the center console. Attacker might take the prize and go without showing that everything around it is just as poorly-built.
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Its always interesting when people are both very smart and also very stupid at the same time.
Knowledgeable and smart are not the same thing. These two are very knowledgeable about the systems they worked on and database manipulation, believe it or not these are not hard skills to learn. But they were incredibly dumb regardless given every single action they took at every point in their lives.
Fun fact. In psychology assessment this are being called hard skills: very technical abilities for doing specialized tasks; and soft skills: social and emotional abilities to navigate social contexts, manage conflict and self regulate emotions.
Hard skills are easier to teach, while soft skills are very hard.
soft skills are very hard
🤔
There are certain positions I would probably be very good at from a technical perspective that I avoid because I know my myself. I could never work for the CIA or FBI for example. I don't want to know their secrets because they could have me weigh a duty to execute my job and protect my family against my duty to humanity. I don't know which principle I would betray, if grappling with it didn't kill me first. Some might think that's an easy choice but the personal cost is extreme — look at Snowden.
No, keep me far away from that shit. Let me grapple with intellectual problems all day long, but moral quandaries paralyze me.
Interesting, such a strong insight is actually part of soft skills. You know yourself, what you don't want to do and stick up to it for your own moral preservation.
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“Eh, they can recover from yesterday,” he said, referring to daily database backups.
But did they recover from backups? Don't leave the most juicy intrigue out of the story.
No one ever tested the backups so they don't know if they will work!
Only a living wage can prevent data dumps.
Upper management can't even see it...yet.
In a row?!
Probably all at once. My guess is they had the script ready to go.
Try not to delete any databases on your way to the parking lot!
Oops! All Databases
"I can't go out for a pack of smokes without running into 9 databases that you dropped!"
But I explicitly stated in the ~~CLAUDE.md~~ employee guidelines to not delete production databases!
Redundant twin brothers to handle the redundant twin backups.
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