Facebook has surfaced yet another bug in its never ending list of bugs. This time, Facebook has found a bug in its login system. This bug could potentially be a very dangerous one. But Facebook says that there is no need to worry as no data is known to be compromised. The bug is related to Facebook’s login system where it is found out that the passwords were stored in plain text. This means that the passwords were visible to all the Facebook employees.
One of the reports say that more than 20,000 Facebook employees had access to these passwords. And it might be possible that a Facebook employee tried to login to your account without you knowing about it. However, Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering, security, and privacy says otherwise. Pedro says that “we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed the passwords,”.
Also, he claims that no one outside of Facebook was able to access these passwords. This means that the breach was an internal one and not vulnerable to public. Facebook has not clarified the exact number but some say that more than 600 million passwords were exposed. Also, the reports add that this bug has been there since 2012.
Facebook also says that they have rectified this bug and have also written a blog post about it. But we feel that this is a serious issue. And that you should change your Facebook profile’s password as a precautionary measure nevertheless. Also, Facebook told in its post that they will notify users whose passwords were available in plain text but the company did not clarify as to when exactly the process will start.
“This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable”, Facebook told.