Connecting to remote db securely

I am writing a content management section for a site that will use as part of the front page three small sub-sections from another site's home page (with their permission, of course). They are worried about giving us the password to their database, where the information is stored, because we are on a different server and they are afraid someone could steal the password since it's being passed un-encrypted by our web server when we try to retrieve the info. Is this something to worry about? Is there a way around this? They suggested using IFrames to display the static information from their page, but this doesn't work with Netscape - at least version 4.7. Any other ideas? TIA, -Lisi