A day after admitting to “unwittingly” emailing nearly 1.5 million new users, Facebook revealed that millions of Instagram passwords were stored on its servers in a readable format.
Facebook unveiled millions of Instagram passwords
Last month, Facebook said it fixed a security problem in which the passwords of millions of users were stored in clear text and in “readable” format for years and were searchable by thousands of its employees.
The company revealed on Thursday that millions of passwords belonging to users of its Instagram photo-sharing service were also exposed.
“We discovered additional Instagram password logs stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this problem has affected millions of Instagram users, ”said the social media giant said in an update.
“We will inform these users as we did the others. Our investigation determined that these stored passwords had not been misused or used internally. “
Facebook had found that some user passwords were stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems.
“It caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable. We have corrected these problems and, as a precaution, we are warning all people whose passwords have been stored in this way ”, said Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, security and privacy.
A Facebook spokesperson admitted Wednesday night that 1.5 million people had received emails since May 2016 to help build Facebook’s social network and recommend that other users add it as a friend.
The revelation emerged after a security researcher noticed that “Facebook asked some users to enter their email password when they signed up to create new accounts to verify their identity” .
The social network said the contacts were not shared with anyone and were deleted.
In March, a report from Krebs On Security claimed that between 200 and 600 million Facebook users, their account passwords could be stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees.
