Hundreds of Millions of Facebook User Passwords Potentially Exposed Internally

Potentially hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ passwords were exposed in plain text to employees, it announced Thursday. The passwords, exposed on internal data storage systems, weren't visible externally, there’s no evidence of abuse, and the issue was corrected, wrote Vice President-Engineering, Security and Privacy Pedro Canahuati. The company plans to notify “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users,” who were potentially affected. The platform discovered the issue during a routine security review in January. “This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable,” Canahuati wrote.