Data Breach Reveals 100k IEEE.org Members' Plaintext Passwords

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 25, 2012 @02:12AM from the pretty-pictures-ugly-facts dept.

First time accepted submitter radudragusin writes "IEEE suffered a data breach which I discovered on September 18. For a few days I was uncertain what to do with the information and the data. Yesterday I let them know, and they fixed (at least partially) the problem. The usernames and passwords kept in plaintext were publicly available on their FTP server for at least one month prior to my discovery. Among the almost 100.000 compromised users are Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle and Samsung employees, as well as researchers from NASA, Stanford and many other places. I did not and will not make the raw data available, but I took the liberty to analyse it briefly."

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Re:Well... by tangent3 · 2012-09-25 03:11 · Score: 5, Informative

Disclaimer: I've RTFA'ed
The passwords were not stored in plaintext.
However, the web server access logs logged the passwords entered in plaintext. That was what was downloaded from a publically access ftp folder.