I believe this exercise is to publicize the situation rather than solve it (the solution being military and independent of this work) and also to see how much rope the bad guys will take before their trial. I.e., like Raffensberger, there had been an opportunity to back out and work with the good guys.
If they obtain the passwords in the manner suggested, they run the risk of any evidence discovered being excluded from potential court cases. The approach the auditors are following may take longer but it is assuring evidence obtained will stand up to legal scrutiny.
if they have access to the box (which it seems they do) it's really, really simple to find out the passwords using software suck as kali or l0phtcrack
I believe this exercise is to publicize the situation rather than solve it (the solution being military and independent of this work) and also to see how much rope the bad guys will take before their trial. I.e., like Raffensberger, there had been an opportunity to back out and work with the good guys.
If they obtain the passwords in the manner suggested, they run the risk of any evidence discovered being excluded from potential court cases. The approach the auditors are following may take longer but it is assuring evidence obtained will stand up to legal scrutiny.
Surprisingly passwords are often stored in just that manner. Still not a good idea to risk a carefully structured legal case by taking a shortcut.