Hacked French network exposed its own passwords during TV interview

While French authorities continued investigating how the TV5Monde network had 11 of its stations' signals interrupted the night before, one of its staffers proved just how likely a basic password theft might have led to the incident.

In an interview about the satellite hack with French news program 13 Heures, TV5Monde reporter David Delos unwittingly revealed at least one password for the station's social media presence. That's because he was filmed in front of a staffer's desk—which was smothered in sticky notes and taped index cards that were covered in account usernames and passwords.

Delos' segment revealed the usernames and passwords for TV5Monde's Twitter and Instagram accounts, but they were too difficult to read in an archived video of the broadcast. That wasn't the case for the YouTube information, however; Twitter user pent0thal confirmed that account's displayed password was "lemotdepassedeyoutube," which translates in English to "the password of YouTube."

A cursory glance at TV5Monde's social media accounts did not reveal any seemingly false or disruptive posts since the passwords were displayed on that French broadcast. However, the same Twitter user found another screengrab of a completely different news segment about TV5Monde's hacking ordeal—which also contained a post-it note with what appeared to be a staffer's general-use username and password.

One follow-up theory about the source of TV5Monde's hacking also hinged on a bad-password issue—namely, that the network's highest-level password was "azerty12345," the French-keyboard equivalent of "qwerty12345"—but that theory hinged on a supposed broadcast by Russian TV station NTV, which Ars Technica was unable to confirm ever took place.