# IT department and auditors at major pharmacy chain got into a rip-roaring fight about using ‘password’ on Cisco firewall

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/it-department-and-auditors-at-major-pharmacy-chain-got-into-a-rip-roaring-fight-about-using-password-on-cisco-firewall/
- Published: 2026-10-22T10:00:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-10-22T10:14:38+00:00
- Original publisher: The Register
- Original article: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/22/it-department-and-auditors-at-major-pharmacy-chain-got-into-a-rip-roaring-fight-about-using-password-on-cisco-firewall/5304592
- Topics: Art, Culture

## Key points

- A pharmacy chain’s edge firewall used “password” for administrator access.
- The credential was stored in easily reversible Cisco Type 7 encoding.
- Bonus rules may have fuelled a prolonged dispute over the finding.

## Summary

A security tester found that a major US pharmacy chain used the word “password” as the administrator password on an internet-facing Cisco firewall. The discovery mattered because anyone who gained ordinary access to the device could potentially elevate their privileges and control network traffic.

The password was stored using Cisco’s reversible Type 7 encoding, which the tester said was easy to decrypt and had long been considered insecure. Auditors rated the issue as high priority, while IT staff argued it was less serious; the dispute lasted over an hour and delayed the presentation of other findings. The tester later learned that a high-priority finding would remove IT staff bonuses, creating an incentive to minimise the problem.

---
Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.