Facebook Mistakenly Stored Millions of Users’ Passwords in Plaintext

What’s more? Not just Facebook, Instagram users are also
affected by the latest security incident.

So, if you are one of the affected users, your Facebook or
Instagram password was readable to some of the Facebook engineers
who have internal access to the servers and the database.

Though the social media company did not mention exactly what
component or application on its website had the programmatic error
that caused the issue, it did reveal that the company discovered
the security blunder in January this year during a routine security
check.

In a blog post published today, Facebook’s vice president of
engineering Pedro Canahuati said an internal investigation of the
incident found no evidence of any Facebook employee abusing those
passwords.

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Facebook has now fixed this issue and recommended users to change
their Facebook and Instagram passwords immediately.

This is yet another security incident for Facebook. In October
last year, Facebook announced its worst-ever security
breach^[4] that allowed hackers to
successfully steal secret access tokens and access personal
information from 29 million Facebook
accounts^[5].

However, Facebook is not alone that exposed hundreds of millions
of its users’ passwords in plain text. Twitter last year also
addressed a similar security incident that unintentionally exposed
passwords for its 330 million
users in readable text on its internal computer system.
^[6]