Facebook: Passwords of millions of users were visible to company employees

Facebook revealed a flaw in their social network that allowed the passwords of hundreds of millions of users to be visible to employees, and said the problem had been removed.

During a review of security around Facebook in January, the company found that passwords were stored in a readable format, which is against security procedures, but they were also visible to anyone outside the company. Most of the users who have been infected have used Facebook Lite, a version of the official application that was released to emerging markets. The company said it had found no evidence of malicious data.

This disclosure is just another "blot" of the company, which is already a bad security and consumer data file. Facebook has not yet coped with some of its biggest security concerns since last year, including the biggest scandal since March 2018 - the sharing of personal data of millions of users with Cambridge Analytica. This revelation led to several government inquiries across the board. In the autumn of the same year, millions of users were affected by a security breach.

The social networking site has revealed the problem of passwords after the KrebsOnSecurity blog - the "cyber - security blog" - learned about this information from an internal source. According to the blog, the problem has existed since 2012.

"The Facebook source reported that the investigation revealed that passwords between 200 and 600 million users were visible, stored in an unprotected manner, which were also available to users of the company." - says the blog.

Source: Bloomberg Finance L.P.

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