Facebook mistakenly stored “hundreds of millions” of passwords in plaintext, unprotected by any encryption, the company has admitted, The Guardian informed.
Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords unprotected
STEPANAKERT, MARCH 22, ARTSAKHPRESS: The mistake, which led to user passwords being kept in Facebook’s internal servers in an insecure way, affects “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users”, according to the social networking site. Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook created for use in nations where mobile data is unaffordable or unavailable.
In a statement, Facebook’s vice-president for engineering, security and privacy, Pedro Canahuati, said: “We have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed” the passwords, which “were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook”. Affected users will be directly notified.
