[nycticorax]

So... The ultimate source of the breach was an exceedingly weak password? OK, I guess that does seem like a rookie mistake, which is worrisome. Sorry for the naive questions, and I apologize for my confrontational tone. But I really had read most of the referenced articles about the Mint hack (not that last one you linked to), and it was still not obvious to me that this was (apparently) incontrovertible evidence of total incompetence on the part of the Mint devs.

Also, is ryanlol a well-known hacker or something? (I had never heard of him.)

[nickpsecurity]

It's all good. We were both going on biased sources. That's why I waited for some kind of independent confirmation. ryanlol claims to be the Finnish hacker that hit hundreds of companies or whatever. Backs up the claim a bit by showing up with more "hands-on evidence" of his assessments as in Mint situation. ;) I wasn't sure if he was saying that was the source of the breach or that they weren't practicing even a checklist amount of security. In latter case, source could be anything. It didn't matter enough to evaluate further as it was clear they weren't systematically working on their security.

I went back to modifying Ubuntu for the Mint use-cases since they do combine usability and at least attempts on their security.