The Forgotten Account
In May 2021 Colonial Pipeline in the United States was hit by ransomware. The CEO later told the Senate that the hackers got in through an old VPN account that should no longer have been in use and had no 2FA. The password was not an easy one, but according to investigators it probably reached the hackers through the dark web. Colonial shut the pipeline as a precaution for about five days and paid 75 bitcoin in ransom, then about 4.4 million dollars. The US government later recovered about 2.3 million of that. It is not known who left that account in place. The characters in this puzzle are made up. The hack is real.
What can you learn?
Old accounts you no longer use are better deleted. Use a different password for every account and turn on 2FA, for example a login code on your phone. Then a stolen password alone is not enough for a hacker.
This does not give away who the weak link in the puzzle is: the characters are made up.