Companies, like Facebook, hash and salt passwords - two ways of further scrambling passwords - to store passwords securely. Storing passwords in readable plaintext is an insecure way of storing passwords. Krebs said as many as 600 million users could be affected - about one-fifth of the company’s 2.7 billion users, but Facebook has yet to confirm the figure.įacebook also didn’t say how the bug came to be. “We have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them,” but did not say how the company made that conclusion.įacebook said it will notify “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users,” a lighter version of Facebook for users where internet speeds are slow and bandwidth is expensive, and “tens of millions of other Facebook users.” The company also said “tens of thousands of Instagram users” will be notified of the exposure. “This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable,” said Canahuati. Facebook admitted the security lapse months later, after Krebs said logs were accessible to some 2,000 engineers and developers. None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook, he said. The discovery was made in January, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. Flip the “days since last Facebook security incident” back to zero.įacebook confirmed Thursday in a blog post, prompted by a report by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext for years.
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