[mothered]

To clarify, the website had encoded SSN's not encrypted them, but the person who found this were called a "hacker" for disclosing.

It's funny how the person who discovered SSNs In the HTML web page source code (that's viewable by anyone), was labelled a hacker.

The web page was taken down, hopefully before malicious users of the site could exploit this weakness.

The web page/website Itself, obviously cannot be exploited purely through SSN numbers.

Though, such details In the hands of users with malicious Intent can have serious consequences.