noah mchugh cybersecurity leader. ciso & consultant. cissp, cism.

noah@earth:~$ cat ~/writing/001-license-plate.md_

001 — SECURITY

YOUR LICENSE PLATE IS GUARDED BY A HARDCODED PASSWORD

Flock's plate-reader cameras shipped with a password baked into the firmware. Not a default you could change. Baked in. Anyone who extracted it owned every camera running that build.

This is the part nobody wants to say out loud: the vendor knew, the customers didn't, and the fix took longer than the disclosure. Hardcoded credentials aren't a bug class. They're a business decision somebody made in a sprint planning meeting.

[SAMPLE BODY — replace with the real essay.]

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