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Facebook acknowledged to have saved hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ passwords in plain text. This includes the users of Facebook Lite passwords, Facebook passwords, and Instagram passwords.
The entire social platform states that it detected the issue as part of a security routine review in couple of months ago in January, however the passwords were saved in a readable format within its storage systems of its internal data, and that merely its company employees had access to the data.
Facebook declared that the matter has been clearly defined and all of the impacted users will be informed accordingly.
“To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them,” the company says.
However, the number of affected users are very large. The entire social platform approximates that hundreds of millions of users on Facebook Lite, tens of millions of users on Facebook, and tens of thousands of users on Instagram are badly affected.
“In the course of our review, we have been looking at the ways we store certain other categories of information — like access tokens — and have fixed problems as we’ve discovered them,” the company says.
Facebook is presently analyzing a series of incidents concerning employees who built applications that logged unencrypted password data information for users of Facebook and saved it in plain text on internal servers of the company.
Brian Krebs, the security blogger also states that the passwords of Facebook users between 200 million and 600 million may have been saved in plain text, and about 20,000 employees of Facebook may have been capable to search those passwords. The security blogger says that some of user passwords might have been saved in plain text for seven years.
Facebook has been subjected to broad criticism since previous year, after it was discovered that it shared the data of the users with other organizations without communicating the affected users. It saves passwords of the users in line with best security practices, covering them so that no one at the company can view them.
“With this technique, we can validate that a person is logging in with the correct password without actually having to store the password in plain text,” the company claims.
An earlier report also revealed that US prosecutors have announced a criminal investigation current month into practice of sharing users of Facebook information data with other companies. The social platform was suspected of cutting particular deals with some advertisers to provide them more admin rights to information data last year in December.
Because last year, the company acknowledged that the information data of up to eighty seven million people worldwide was politically harvested consulting company Cambridge Analytica through researcher of an academic individual prediction app.