Facebook has once again found itself at the center of a scandal concerning user data privacy. This time, it emerged that the passwords of 200 to 600 million users of Facebook Lite, Facebook, and Instagram were stored in plain text on the company’s servers, accessible to thousands of employees.
Brian Krebs (Brian Krebs), a renowned journalist specializing in cybersecurity, was the first to report on this issue. In his article, Krebs cites data obtained from an unidentified Facebook employee holding a leadership position within the company.
According to Krebs, Facebook is currently conducting an internal investigation that has already revealed that the passwords of hundreds of millions of users were stored in plain text and were freely accessible to 20,000 employees of the company. The source indicated that representatives of the social network were unable to determine the exact number of passwords or how long they had been available to employees. Some of the data dates back to 2012.
Furthermore, according to the source, logs already showed that approximately 2,000 Facebook engineers and developers had sent around 9,000,000 internal requests for data items containing users’ passwords in plain text.
Following Krebs’ publication, Facebook representatives were forced to publish an official statement about the incident.
The company confirmed that the password issue was discovered in January of this year and is currently under investigation. So far, Facebook is not ready to provide the exact number and dates (however, it is reported that we are talking about tens of millions of users). Nevertheless, representatives of the social network claim that users’ passwords were not “visible” to anyone outside Facebook and that, to date, no abuse of this data by employees themselves has been reported.
According to the social network, the passwords on the company’s servers were, of course, saved “unintentionally.” At present, all passwords have already been masked, and affected users will be informed of the incident as soon as the investigation into it is complete.
