For those that don't know, an HP MSA2000 is a baby SAN - a small business storage array.
There's not a lot of info in that post, and I don't see any other posts in the thread. This is an issue if it can be accessed remotely, but not a big deal if it requires a console cable.
Even if it CAN be accessed remotely, it shouldn't be as big an issue as you'd think. SANs are usually not connected to the Internet and the management ports should be set on separate management VLANs. The number of SAN installs I've seen where the SAN engineer installing it left the passwords at the default and the customer never changed them is mind-boggling, anyway.
Not to take away from the importance of something like this, but it's not as severe as say, a remote-root exploit in Linux.
Pretty serious, considering that these devices can do iSCSI - meaning any machine with access to it over the LAN, such as any machine that is getting some iSCSI storage from the device, can now do nefarious things.
Would it not be the case, that a compromised machine that was mounting iSCSI, might then be able to access the hidden admin feature? It could then mount other volumes read-only and read data meant to be private...
Not necessarily. In most cases administration access to these things are on an entirely separate network from connection protocol. Having an iSCSI / nfs connection isn't enough; you'd also have to be on the same network as the management interface.
HP's high-end 'ProLiant' kit have "Integrated Lights-out" that will allow you to do things like power cycle the device, drop on to the serial console, etc. All over a user friendly web interface.
I'm assuming this 'admin backdoor' it is for that.
It's a SAN device with a ton of drive bays. We've got a few and they seem pretty speedy, haven't had an issue with them.
I'm already investigating what generation we have - but I'm almost certain our initial setup on at least one was using the admin !admin credentials, which means that it's documented _somewhere_.
