Facebook employees had access to millions of passwords

It has emerged that Facebook employees have had access to millions of users' passwords in unencrypted plaintext since 2012.

Facebook confirmed yesterday that the passwords to hundreds of millions of accounts had been stored in readable plaintext on its internal servers, and that employees had access to the list. The social media giant admitted that "hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, millions of Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users" were affected.

Employees at Facebook reportedly wrote a piece of software that logged unencrypted passwords for users in a file that could be searched. While Facebook doesn't consider this to be a data breach, around 20,000 of its employees had access to the passwords that users assumed were being stored securely and handled according to modern cyber-security standards.

Facebook clarified that "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," but the company isn't taking any chances. All users affected by the incident will be contacted so that they can reset their passwords.

Source: Techcentral.ie