Looks like Facebook had another security issue.
Facebook confirmed today that in January, it found "some" user passwords that were being stored in plain text in its internal data storage systems. The passwords are supposed to be stored in a way that makes them unreadable, but Facebook says that some unspecified "issues" caused them to be viewable. Those issues have since been fixed.
In its announcement, Facebook says that the user passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook. It adds that it's found no evidence that anyone inside Facebook abused or improperly accessed the user passwords.
Users affected by these issues will be notified by Facebook. The company says that it will alert hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users.
A report from Krebs on Security sheds a bit more light on the situation. It's said that between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and that they were searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. Facebook is reportedly still worked to determine exactly how many user passwords were exposed and how long they were viewable, but so far the investigation has found archives with plain text user passwords from all the way back in 2012.
While it is a relief that these user passwords weren't viewable to anyone outside of Facebook, and that Facebook has found no evidence that anyone inside the company improperly accessed them, this is still a pretty serious issue. Not only were user passwords stores in plain text that was readable by anyone, there were hundreds of millions of people affected. What's more, this is just the latest in a string of Facebook security issues.
