A lesson from Sony’s massive hack: Don’t store your passwords in Word docs and Excel sheets

It’s been a bad week for Sony Pictures, as hackers have compromised thousands of sensitive files–some not so sensitively stored.

These include plenty of documents–Word docs and Excel spreadsheets–containing all of the company’s passwords–from admin passwords to computer and database passwords, all stored in a folder called “Passwords,” as Fusion.net reveals.

Files with names like “Password File.doc” and “Server Priviledged Access.xlsx”–not to mention the previous data dump that contained employees’ and execs’ personal information–may be enough to make you shudder, but it’s not just Sony that does this. The truth is plenty of companies store or have stored password lists like this in regular documents, password-protected, perhaps, but perhaps not.

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