Digital Prank

An ethical hacker from HackersBlog today claimed that he was able to carry out a SQL injection attack successfully and has got access to the complete database to a popular UK daily, The Daily Telegraph. The site has also released snapshots of databases, passwords in clear text and email addresses of those receiving the newsletter which are highly sensitive.

Unfortunately, this has compromised "hundreds of thousands of subscriber email addresses and more worryingly, passwords in clear text," according to Rik Ferguson on Trend Micro’s security blog. Actually I am quite surprised to see the site handles user passwords in clear text at database level. As per a recent research 61% of people use the same password for various sites and even though passwords can be made strong and complex a vulnerability like this will definitely put the users under trouble. Hope The Daily Telegraph learn from this and will go on keep the user information secured and encrypted.