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Facebook Passwords Exposed: Company Announces Fix For ‘200-600 Million’ Impacted User Profiles
Facebook logos are pictured on the screens of a smartphone (R), and a laptop computer (Photo credit: JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images)
Facebook yesterday (21 March) announced that is has fixed a glitch which was revealing millions of users’ passwords, kept internally in a readable format, to its employees, reports Mint.
The issue was first brought to light by cybersecurity website KrebsOnSecurity, which in its report revealed that the passwords had been accessible to nearly 20,000 Facebook employees, going back to as early as 2012.
"These passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them," Facebook said in its statement.
KrebsOnSecurity cited a senior Facebook employee to claim that the company’s own internal probe into the matter had put the number of exposed passwords at between 200 million to 600 million.
According to Facebook, the problem was first discovered in January during a routine security review, with the majority of those who were affected being users of Facebook Lite, which is a version of Facebook used in places with problems of low connectivity.
As part of its probe, the company will also be looking into a number of security failures, which were apparently caused by its employees creating applications logging unencrypted passwords of users.
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