Thousands of servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controllers

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https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/thousands-of-servers-can-be-backdoored-by-exploiting-buggy-motherboard-controllers/

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That sounds like a tiny number…

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As someone who bought a Supermicro board 6 weeks ago and was super happy to learn about IPMI: oh no.

I flashed the latest bmc firmware and bios the day I got it running (also fuck paywalling the bmc UI for bios updates), but… 😬

E: holy shit it truncates passwords to 19 characters. One of my weakest passwords, in the bottom 10 of like 450 passwords.

E2: I can’t disable KCS, I can’t disable the IPMI (short of unplugging the ethernet cable), I can’t disable the default user or limit the privileges, so I had delete my user, login as the default, then change the username and password to my user creds. Like, wow.

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IPMI/BMC have been known problems since 2015, if not before.

Matthew Garrett: IPMI - because ACPI and UEFI weren’t terrifying enough

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Really interesting watch, thanks :)

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Brother….. IPMI is a dumpster fire of security, it should be on its own mgmt network alone.

I use IPMI as a demo of how to use tcpdump and jack the ripper to compromise an ipmi login. It’s trivial.

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I just always kind of assumed idrac and ilo where dangerous as shit and kept them air gapped/on their own off-internet VLAN.

Why the fuck would you let those touch anything else?

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Not an article about waiting staff.

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