In PuTTY, Scripted Passwords are Exposed Passwords

PuTTY is one of the oldest and most popular SSH clients, originally for Windows, but now available on several platforms. It has won corporate support and endorsement, and is prepared and bundled within several third-party repositories. Unfortunately, the 0.74 stable PuTTY release does not safely guard plain-text passwords provided to it via the -pw command line option for the psftp, pscp, and plink utilities as the documentation clearly warns. There is evidence within the source code that the authors are aware of the problem, but the exposure is confirmed on Microsoft Windows, Oracle Linux, and the package prepared by the OpenBSD project.