Less than four hours after I exclusively reported the Theatre Royal’s web oopsie, they’ve fixed it. A new email has gone out with a new, unique temporary password for each user.
Loophole closed, and an sjhoward.co.uk win!
This post was filed under: Technology, Data Protection, Newcastle upon Tyne, Theatre Royal.
Theatre Royal, Newcastle upon Tyne
The Theatre Royal in Newcastle (the Northern Home of the Royal Shakespeare Company) has a new website today, developed by Firechaser.
I don’t know about chasing a fire, but they may need to extinguish a virtual one soon.
The Theatre has emailed me to say that my details have been moved over to the new site, and I should login with my email address and the temporary password of “theatreroyal”.
Yes, logging in with my email address and that pisspoor non-unique standardised password will give you access to all of my personal data – including my phone number, address, and theatrical interests – plus the opportunity to change my password and lock me out of my own account. Or at least it would, if I hadn’t changed my password.
That is a clear and obvious breach of the Data Protection Act’s security requirements – plus, it’s frankly astounding that anyone thought it would be okay. Let’s hope they wise-up soon.
Photo by Stephen Douglas, used under licence
This post was filed under: Technology, Data Protection, Newcastle upon Tyne, Theatre Royal.
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