Cyber security breach: Why were Yahoo!'s passwords left unencrypted?

JMH · Jul 13, 2012

A Yahoo security breach that exposed 450,000 usernames and passwords from a site on the huge web portal indicates that the company failed to take even basic precautions to protect the data.

Security experts were left bemused as to why a company as large as Yahoo would fail to cryptographically store the passwords in its database. Instead, they were left in plain text, which means a hacker could easily read them.

"It is definitely poor security," Marcus Carey, a security researcher at Rapid7, said. "It's not even security 101. It's basic application development 101."

http://news.techworld.com/security/...re-yahoos-passwords-left-unencrypted/?olo=rss

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Cyber security breach: Why were Yahoo!'s passwords left unencrypted?

JMH

Emeritus, Contributor