Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by timothy on 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."

5 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does this make plaintext password storage an IEEE standard now?

    That could save an, er, friend of mine, a lot of work...

    1. Re:Well... by tangent3 · · 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.

  2. Re:Secure password message falls on deaf ears by MadKeithV · · Score: 5, Funny

    . We need to go back to the drawing board and figure out a better way to get the message across, including tools to make it easy for people to get it right.

    Maybe it would work if we could get a battery-powered horse to staple the correct message to people.

  3. Re:For God's Sake by teslar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a scientist. I write papers that are published in academic journals and I review such papers for journals. Journals use editorial managers to, well, manage, the entire process and you'd be surprised how often those send out automated e-mails that, helpfully, contain my login and password IN PLAINTEXT, just in case I might have forgotten (even if I did not request the password).

    In general terms, if you use a website that is able to remind you of your password if you forgot, consider that password known to the world and all other accounts that use the same or a similar password at high risk of being compromised.

    Oh and I have an Obligatory XKCD too.

  4. Re:Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, but the "most used passwords" should really be a bar graph not a line graph. It's not like the midpoint between "ADMIN123" and "IEE2012" makes any sense.