Facebook stored users' passwords in 'readable' form
Facebook on March 21 said it
has fixed a security issue wherein millions of its users’ passwords were stored
in plain text and “readable” format for years and according to reports, were
searchable by thousands of its employees.
The report by KrebsOnSecurity
claimed that around 200-600 million Facebook users may have had their account
passwords stored in plain text and searchable by over 20,000 Facebook
employees.
In a blog post later,
Facebook said as part of a routine security review in January, it found that
some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within our internal
data storage systems.
“This caught our attention
because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that
make them unreadable. We have fixed these issues
and as a precaution will be notifying everyone whose passwords we found stored
this way,” wrote Pedro Canahuati, VP Engineering, Security and Privacy at
Facebook.
The company, however, said
these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook.
“We have found no evidence
to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. We estimate
that we will notify this to hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens
of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users."
Facebook Lite is a version
of Facebook, predominantly used by people in regions with lower connectivity.
“Out of an abundance of
caution, we are telling people so that they can change passwords if they
choose,” Facebook tweeted.
Earlier this month, Facebook
came under careful examination for using phone numbers provided for security reasons —
like two-factor authentication (2FA) — for things like advertising and making
users searchable by their phone numbers across its different platforms.
“Consider enabling a
security key or two-factor authentication to protect your Facebook account
using codes from a third party authentication app. When you log in with your
password, we will ask for a security code or to tap your security key to verify
that it is you,” Facebook advised.
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