Facebook Inc left hundreds of millions of user passwords readable by its employees for years, the company said on Thursday after a security researcher exposed the lapse.
By storing passwords in readable plain text, Facebook violated fundamental computer-security practices, which call for organizations and Web sites to save passwords in a scrambled form that makes it almost impossible to recover the original text.
Facebook said there is no evidence its employees abused access to this data, but thousands of employees could have searched them.
The passwords were stored on internal company servers, where no outsiders could access them, the company said.
Even so, some privacy experts suggested that users change their Facebook passwords.
The incident reveals yet another huge and basic oversight at a company that insists it is a responsible guardian for the personal data of its 2.3 billion users worldwide.
Security blog KrebsOnSecurity said that Facebook might have left the passwords of about 600 million Facebook users vulnerable.
In a blog post, Facebook said it would likely notify “hundreds of millions” of Facebook Lite users, millions of Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users that their passwords were stored in plain text.
Facebook Lite is a version designed for people with older phones or slow Internet connections. It is used primarily in developing countries.
Facebook said it discovered the problem in January, but security researcher Brian Krebs wrote that in some cases the passwords had been stored in plain text since 2012.
Facebook Lite launched in 2015 and Facebook bought Instagram in 2012.
The problem was not due to a single bug, Facebook said.
During a routine review in January, it said it found that the plain text passwords were unintentionally captured and stored in its internal storage systems. This happened in a variety of circumstances, for example, when an app crashed and the resulting crash log included a captured password.
Facebook’s normal procedure for passwords is to store them encoded, the company said in its blog post.
That is good to know, although Facebook engineers apparently added code that defeated the safeguard, security researcher Rob Graham said.
“They have all the proper locks on the doors, but somebody left the window open,” he said.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
RSS