Millions of Facebook passwords exposed- Here’s all you need to know

California, Mar 22: Facebook is one of the most used social platforms. Facebook is where everyone shared everything from first baking at home to memorials of loved ones. But now, Facebook is facing another disastrous situation.

Facebook yesterday announced that is has fixed a glitch which was revealing millions of users’ passwords, kept internally in a readable format, to its employees. The passwords of millions of Facebook users were accessible by up to 20,000 employees of the social network, it has been reported.

 

In the official statement, Facebook said, it had now resolved a ‘glitch’ that had stored the passwords on its internal network.

He said, The passwords that were exposed could date back to 2012. In a comprehensive expose, Mr. Krebs said a Facebook source had told him about "security failures" that had let developers create applications that logged and stored the passwords without encrypting them.

Commenting on Mr. Krebs's story Facebook engineer, Scott Renfro said, “an internal investigation started after Facebook had uncovered the logs had not revealed any "signs of misuse”.

In public comments, Facebook said it had discovered the issue in January as part of a routine security review.

Further, Company stated, “We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users”.

Facebook says it will be notifying everyone whose passwords were stored in this way. And it’s not a small amount: Hundreds of millions could be affected, the company said, “We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users.”

Facebook would enforce a password re-set only if its taskforce looking into the issue uncovered abuse of the login credentials.

The news caps a long period of trouble for Facebook over the way it handles and protects user data. In September last year, it said information on 50 million users had been exposed by a security flaw.

And earlier in 2018, it revealed that data on millions of users had been harvested by data science company Cambridge Analytica.