Facebook on Thursday admitted that millions of passwords were stored in plain text on its internal servers, a security slip that left them readable by the social networking platform's employees. "To be clear, these 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," Pedro Canahuati, the company's vice president of engineering, security, and privacy, said in a blog post.
The blunder was uncovered during a routine security review early this year, according to Canahuati, and comes after a series of controversies centered on whether Facebook properly safeguards the privacy and data of its users.
Canahuati said that the Silicon Valley company expected to notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users whose passwords may have been vulnerable to prying eyes.
The California firm reaches an estimated 2.7 billion people with its core social network, Instagram and messaging applications. Brian Krebs, of security news website KrebsOnSecurity.com, cited an unnamed Facebook source as saying the internal investigation had so far indicated that as many as 600 million users of the social network had account passwords stored in plain text files searchable by more than 20,000 employees.
The exact number had yet to be determined, but archives with unencrypted user passwords were found dating back to the year 2012, according to Krebs.
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