Facebook exposed millions of Instagram passwords to employees

Facebook says they stored millions of Instagram users’ passwords in readily available files employees can access.

The security issue came to light last month after it was discovered hundreds of millions of Facebook passwords were exposed.

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They previously claimed tens of thousands of Instagram users were affected but now they’ve revised that number to millions.

The tech giant has been storing passwords in plain text files readily available to around 20,000 employees since roughly 2012.

Passwords are typically encrypted to allow websites to confirm what you type without directly accessing it. Various errors have caused Facebook’s system to log some passwords into files accessible to the company.

The company released a statement in March claiming they fixed the issues and contacted affected users. They also claim they found no evidence of misuse or abuse of the information.

“To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them,” the statement reads.

The company first discovered the error in January but didn’t publicly acknowledge it until they released their statement in March. Facebook quietly updated their post to reflect the actual number of people affected after finding “additional logs of Instagram passwords.”

Facebook has faced an especially bad year with frequent outages, intrusive data access and bloated platform measurements. They also faced a boycott after reports confirmed Russian trolls targeted black Facebook users during the 2016 U.S. election.

People are rightfully outraged over the issues Facebook’s created in recent years, it’s unlikely people will stop using the platform.

What do you think of the latest Facebook security issue? Let us know in the comments below.

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