WatchGuard has been caught doing what a lot of first-timers to access control have done - simply hashing passwords as a means of implementing security - but perhaps all isn't that bad in the world.
Information security researcher Jérôme Nokin, who runs a blog on all the fun things you can do over IP, found that WatchGuard's firewall appliances are taking a bit of a shortcut when it comes to storing passwords.
It's the typical mistake of recognising that storing plain text passwords is a big no-no, but not going any further than simply hashing the password. In WatchGuard's case, it had been performing an NTLM hash of the password and that's it.
Some might recognise NTLM as being part of Microsoft's old security protocol suite that, these days, is no longer recommended by Redmond because it is so outdated. As Nokin also learned, an NTLM hash is simply the password converted to Unicode, then MD4 applied to it.
via A good password can still trump sketchy security | ZDNet.