Facebook restores millions of exposed Instagram passwords
Facebook admitted on "unintentionally" uploading emails of nearly 1.5 million new users, for which the company has now revealed that millions of Instagram passwords were stored on its servers in a readable format.
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The company said last month that it had fixed a security issue wherein million of users passwords had been stored in a plain text and readable format for years and were searchable by thousands of employees.
On Thursday, Facebook revealed that millions of passwords belonging to Instagram users were also exposed.
Facebook went on to say in an update that they had discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format that the company acknowledged that this issue had an impact on millions of Instagram users.
The company will be notifying the users and their investigation determined that the stored passwords had not been internally abused or improperly accessed.
The social media giant found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within the internal data storage system.
Pedro Canahuati, Vice President, Engineering, Security and Privacy at Facebook wrote, "This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable. We have fixed these issues and as a precaution will be notifying everyone whose passwords we found stored this way".
The Facebook spokesperson admitted that 1.5 million people were harvested since May 2016 to help build Facebook' web of social connection and recommended others to add as friends.
This came into light after a security researcher found that "Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities". With this, Facebook said that the contacts were not shared with anyone and were being deleted.
According to a report by Krebs in March On Security, there were around 200-600 million Facebook users that may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and was searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees.
(With IANS inputs)
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