You know the Duke of Cambridge, popularly known as Prince William? Yeah, well, the English monarchy likes to release photos of their royals for public relation purposes. Last week Prince William’s official website released some photos of ole William and his role as a Royal Air Force (RAF) search and rescue helicopter pilot. One of these photos held an unknown surprise.

If you look closely at the photo above, you will notice that, somewhere in the photo, there is a piece of paper that lists the the username and password for “MilFlip” login. Haven’t found it? I’ll give you a clue:

Doing some quick research on MilFlip, it appears to be a website used by the RAF to store unclassified flight information. So the system itself doesn’t appear to be too critical, and this leak probably didn’t cause too much, if any, harm. Plus, the mistake was quickly fixed by UK’s Ministry of Defence once they were notified, and the photo was photoshopped to remove the login details:

The password was also reset, just in case anyone got bright ideas.

However, this is a lesson in password security: you should never write down your passwords. In fact, you shouldn’t even write down your usernames. If you do write them, however, you should at least take them down before you allow a camera to roam the office.

With so many smartphones out in the world today, I wish you best of luck in that latter endeavor. So don’t write your passwords down!

[via NakedSecurity]