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by mtmail 4183 days ago
The number of companies that send (and possibly store) plain text passwords is scary. I keep reporting them to http://plaintextoffenders.com/
1 comments

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.