I believe they mean hashed (as pointed out later in the article) but if it was encryption I'd disagree pretty strongly with the assertion it's safer than straig

I believe they mean hashed (as pointed out later in the article) but if it was encryption I'd disagree pretty strongly with the assertion it's safer than straight hashing. If you don't need the original password, hashing should be used, not encryption. Hashing means there is no issue of key management as is the case with the encryption system. If those keys are mishandled then it's trivial to recover all the plaintext passwords. Decryption would be difficult without the keys, but it's likely that (a) they have keys stored somewhere insecure or (b) they'd perform the encryption with a single key for all passwords. For (b), this means you simply had to have a valid account and you'd have a plaintext-ciphertext pair to bruteforce. Once that single key is extracted you'd have access to all the other passwords as well.