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by dpwm 4183 days ago
Photobox acquired Moonpig in 2011 [1]. In 2010, Photobox got called out for emailing passwords in plaintext[2], and were quick to take to twitter to say "It will never happen again."[3] At that point, it had only been happening for 4 years [4].

Coupled with the tone of the job advert already posted by others [5], it doesn't seem too hard to imagine a corporate culture where security is not a serious concern until things go wrong.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14275632

[2] http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/360163/photobox-sorry-a...

[3] https://twitter.com/PhotoBox/status/20719242964

[4] http://blog.dave.org.uk/2006/06/more-password-s.html

[5] http://careers.photobox.co.uk/security-officer-moonpig/

[edited for clarity]

1 comments

The number of companies that send (and possibly store) plain text passwords is scary. I keep reporting them to http://plaintextoffenders.com/
I was about to ask why anyone would bother sending plain text passwords and store them encrypted. I then remembered a high-school friend's first (and largely unsupervised) job where IIRC he devised a ridiculous password encryption (not hashing) scheme in PHP (on shared hosting).

Unrelated horror unfolded a couple of years later when for some peculiar reason he had to move the site to a godaddy VPS. An unencrypted customer database sitting at /db.sql, fully accessible to the world. Apache had been configured to show directory indexes and, to take the site offline, /index.php had been removed. I think at the time I even needed to explain the possible consequences. I just remember being told that the database was restoring and it wouldn't take too much longer!

I think any remaining part of me that implicitly trusted interesting websites with personal data died that day.