UK Pub Chain 'Greene King' Gift Card Website Hacked
Major UK pub chain, Greene King (Bury St. Edmunds), had its gift card website ( https://www.gkgiftcards.co.uk ) compromised by hackers. The personal data breach was discovered on 14th May 2019 and confirmed a day later. The pub, restaurant and hotel chain informed their impacted customers by email today (28th May 2019). Greene King said the hackers were able to access: name email address user ID encrypted password address post code The pub chain did not disclose any further details on how passwords were "encrypted", only to say within their customer disclosure email " Whilst your password was encrypted, it may still be compromised". It is a long established good industry coding practice for a website application's password storage to use a one-way 'salted' hash function, as opposed to storing customer plaintext passwords in an encrypted form . No details were provided on how the hackers were able to compromise the gift card website, but th...