Revealed: your Facebook password is not secret

Your password on Facebook is exposed to the giant social media staff who can choose to access your private data or not.

Facebook on Thursday admitted that millions of passwords were stored in plain text on its internal servers, a security slip that left them readable by the social networking platform’s employees.

“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,” Pedro Canahuati, the company’s vice president of engineering, security, and privacy, said in a blog post.

The blunder was uncovered during a routine security review early this year, according to Canahuati, and comes after a series of controversies centred on whether Facebook properly safeguards the privacy and data of its users.

Canahuati said that the Silicon Valley company expected to notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users whose passwords may have been vulnerable to prying eyes.

The California firm reaches an estimated 2.7 billion people with its core social network, Instagram and messaging applications.

Facebook

Brian Krebs, of security news website KrebsOnSecurity.com, cited an unnamed Facebook source as saying the internal investigation had so far indicated that as many as 600 million users of the social network had account passwords stored in plain text files searchable by more than 20,000 employees.

The exact number had yet to be determined, but archives with unencrypted user passwords were found dating back to the year 2012, according to Krebs.

Facebook’s admission of the faux pas came after the report by Krebs.

“We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way,” Canahuati said.

Facebook’s practice is to mask people’s passwords by replacing them with random characters and then tucking away software keys needed to make sense of the jumble, according to Canahuati.

The technique allows Facebook’s system to recognise valid passwords when users log in, without storing the information in plain text that employees or hackers could read.

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