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Facebook stored millions of account passwords in plain text and readable format

There were around 200-600 million Facebook users that may have their account passwords stored in plain text and were also searched by over 2,000 Facebook employees

By Newsd
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Social media giant Facebook on Thursday said that I security issue was fixed where millions of passwords were stored in plain text and readable format.

Reports suggest that this issue was there for years and it was searched by thousands of Facebook employees.

According to a report, there were around 200-600 million Facebook users that may have their account passwords stored in plain text and were also searched by over 2,000 Facebook employees.

Facebook said in the blog post that when the routine security review in January was carried out the company had found some users password being stored in a readable format with internal data storage systems.

Pedro Canahuati, VP Engineering, Security and Privacy at Facebook said, “We have fixed these issues and as a precaution will be notifying everyone whose passwords we found stored this way”.

Facebook also said that these passwords were never visible to anyone outside the company. There has been no evidence of anyone internally misusing the data and the company plans on notifying this to hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users along with Facebook and Instagram users.

In regions with lower connectivity, people use Facebook Lite.

Facebook tweeted, “Out of an abundance of caution, we are telling people so that they can change passwords if they choose”.

Earlier this month, Facebook came under the scrutiny for using phone numbers that were provided for security reasons like two-factor authentication for things like advertising and making users searchable by their phone numbers across its different platforms.

Facebook adviced by saying, ” Consider enabling a security key or two-factor authentication to protect your Facebook account using codes from a third party authentication app. When you log in with your password, we will ask for a security code or to tap your security key to verify that it is you”.

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