If I might be so bold, but this seems to go on all the time.

We use a Contact Relationship Management (CRM) packare from e.Piphany called 
ActiveSales (or e.Piphany Sales or eSales, whatever it is this week) that has a front 
end client and a repository independant back end database (Access, SQL Server, Oracle, 
DB2, anything that is ODBC compliant). The app logs into the database as a single 
super user. While you *can* change the out of the box password, it's a pain, and my 
guess is that 90%+ of their clients have not.

The same goes for Lawson Financials. Although it does support using the embedded 
database security, we've found that support is more difficult to get from them since 
the CIA is the only other customer that seems to be using it this way.

Most business applications these days rely on a 3rd party RDBMS to store their data, 
and most of them (even SQL Server, if done correctly) have security models that are 
sound, clean, and granular. However, what most developers seem to do is create a 
single users with dba rights that owns and operates on all their data, so they only 
have to deal with the implications of their code, and now what the database might and 
might not let them do. 

One could argue that the use of a directory service can make this simpler, and it 
does, but not much. In Oracle, one can identify a user externally, meaning that their 
account information is stored outside Oracle, but their rights are still in the data 
dictionary. That means that I still need to give them the appropriate rights to 
objects in the database.

In my opinion (and we know how much that counts), all the mid-tier apps I've seen take 
little or no advantage of the database engine people pay to store their data. Security 
(and performance) can best be served though stored procedures and embedded database 
security. 

Thoughts?

Thanks,
John

Unless the Voices are Mistaken, Stefan Hoelzner ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Wrote:
> 
> 
> SAP R/3 default password vulnerability
> 
> Summary
> =======
> SAP R/3 ships with four default user accounts that are protected with commonly known 
>passwords. These user accounts are equipped with super- or power user access rights. 

-- 
John W. Eisenschmidt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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