Tesco's Twitter feed responded to Hunt's accusations: "Passwords are stored in a secure way. They're only copied into plain text when pasted automatically into a password reminder email." Tesco has yet to suffer a known online security breach, but Hunt implied that if the company were to be targeted, hackers might have very little trouble obtaining and publishing Tesco's customer and employee information, including credit card numbers. "We are aware of the issues relating to the Tesco website and will be making enquiries," a spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office told London's Telegraph newspaper. Security naughtiness Most security experts say websites should have no access at all to the original customer passwords. Instead, best practices call for hashing the passwords by running them through an encryption process, and salting them by adding secret data that will result in values unknown to hackers.