Facebook acknowledges millions of user passwords stored in "readable format"

WASHINGTON, March 21 (KUNA) -- Facebook Vice President of Engineering, Security and Privacy, Pedro Canahuati acknowledged that millions of user passwords were stored in a "readable format" within its internal data storage systems.
This problem was detected during "a routine security review in January," Canahuati said in a statement on Thursday. "This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable," he said, affirming that these issues have been "fixed." "As a precaution, we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way.
"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," he stressed.
He indicated that it is estimated that the company will notify "hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users." "There is nothing more important to us than protecting people's information, and we will continue making improvements as part of our ongoing security efforts at Facebook," he added. (end) si.gb