Within a few hours, I have run the list of hashes through "rainbow tables"—a huge database of precomputed password hashes—recovering the passwords of most of the company’s employees. I eventually find one of the back-end computer servers that process customer transactions but discover the credit card numbers are encrypted. Not a problem: I find the key used to encrypt the card numbers is conveniently hidden in a stored procedure within the database on a computer known as the "SQL server," accessible to any database administrator.