Data breach at Facebook: passwords are stored unencrypted

Facebook has admitted that the passwords of millions of users in unencrypted form on its internal servers. There is but "so far" no evidence of abuse, the company said.

passwords of millions of Facebook users have been for the employees of the Online network in clear text accessible. "We expect that we will notify hundreds of millions of users of Facebook Lite, tens of millions of other Facebook users, as well as tens of thousands of Instagram users," the company said in a blog post. Facebook Lite is a stripped-down Version for users of the Online network in regions with slow Internet lines.

Facebook have no evidence that someone internally handles abusive to it's name. The passwords were also not for anyone outside of the company. The affected users should, nevertheless, "as a precaution" to be notified, although there is no indication of a misuse of the data.

The passwords would actually have to be internally unrecognizable. The error was noticed during a Routine audit in January. He had now been fixed - Facebook did not indicate when exactly.

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg must deal with a margin of safety in his company.

Up to 600 million users

Shortly before the Facebook message had been reported to the IT security expert Brian Krebs in his Blog about the case. He wrote with reference to non-identified Facebook-Insider, more than 20,000 employees of the Online network may have access to the clear-text stored passwords.

in Total, could be affected 200 to 600 million Facebook users. The archive files with non-encrypted words back were rarely pass up to the year 2012, wrote cancer. According to the log data of around 2000 developers have made about nine million internal queries for data elements, the exposed passwords contained.

More:

'privacy': Zuckerberg promises more privacy, 07.03.2019 Atlas |USA |Palo Alto

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