Facebook stored passwords of 600 million users in plain text, accessible by 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.

Source