Facebook data of 540 million users exposed online including their passwords

This is when the company realized they stored passwords of their users in plain text. This meant that all the Facebook users’ passwords were visible to the Facebook employees. However, the company has claimed that no damage was done due to this.

Now, we have yet another story of Facebook data being exposed. This time, it is found out that about 540 million Facebook users had their Facebook data exposed. This data includes your passwords, comments, likes, reactions, account names, user IDs and more.

However, this time the data was found by a security research company named UpGuard. The company found out two datasets which contained all the above-mentioned data of Facebook users. However, the datasets were available publicly and contained sensitive information about its users.

Now, UpGuard decided to connect a dataset to Media Company based in Mexico named Cultura Collectiva. And it was found out that the dataset contains 146GB of data containing over 540 million Facebook users’ data.

UpGuard found out that the second leak was regarding an app available inside Facebook called “At the pool”. This dataset contained passwords of more than 22000 Facebook users. But UpGuard says that the passwords might also be for the game rather than Facebook accounts itself.

UpGuard also adds that the datasets were found from the Amazon S3 buckets. It is no secret that Facebook is hosted on Amazon Web Services but the bad part is that the datasets were not secured. Once the issue was covered, Facebook issued a statement saying that:

“Facebook’s policies prohibit storing Facebook information in a public database. Once alerted to the issue, we worked with Amazon to take down the databases. We are committed to working with the developers on our platform to protect people’s data.”

Source: Gizmodo