First time reading about government systems, eh?

Why not? National Safety Department of Slovak Republic (Narodny Bezpecnostny Urad) had password NBUSK123… just government things

Because like all critical infrastructure it was setup by somebody's kid on work experience

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.

Well how else would they help the users if they ever forgot their passwords? Duh.

/s

Probably for the same reasons web browsers store them in plain text: They don‘t care.

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.

Oh I'm sure the government loved taking them, since >Half of all Politicians are corrupt fraudsters.

wire fraud

Relatives of El Nasir?

Company only paid for a 7 year background check, so you mis them getting out of prison 8 years ago.

Probably not one of the 96(+) databases they had :(

DROP TABLE students

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.

Peter Thiel probably has a backup copy now from doge unfortunately.

Oh for something important like that we have backups.

Wasn't that a premise in Mr Robot?

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

Try not to delete any databases on your way to the parking lot!

No one ever tested the backups so they don't know if they will work!

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.