Science

Facebook left up to 600 MILLION users' passwords stored in plain text


Facebook left up to 600 MILLION users’ passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of employees

  • Security researcher Brian Krebs reports 200-600 million users were affected 
  • The passwords were only visible internally, to Facebook employees, firm says 
  • Facebook also says there is no evidence that anyone internally abused this

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users may have had their passwords exposed as the result of an alarming oversight by the social media company.

The shocking vulnerability was first revealed by security researcher Brian Krebs, and Facebook has since confirmed it.

The firm says it uncovered the issue back in January during a ‘routine security review.’

The shocking vulnerability was first revealed by security researcher Brian Krebs, and Facebook has since confirmed it

The shocking vulnerability was first revealed by security researcher Brian Krebs, and Facebook has since confirmed it

‘As part of a routine security review in January, we found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems,’ Facebook said on Thursday.

‘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 we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way.’

 

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