IPMI Insecurity Affects 200k Systems

Research by Dan Farmer and HD Moore shows that major vendors' implementations of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) expose hundreds of thousands of Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) to the Internet with severe configuration and protocol flaws. Scans identified over 230,000 Internet-accessible BMCs, many allowing unauthenticated access via NULL users, default/shared passwords, vendor backdoors, or IPMI v2.0 "Cipher 0" behavior; the weaknesses can allow system-level compromise and lateral movement, prompting calls for vendor and operator remediation.