Facebook exposed millions of Instagram passwords

A day after admitting it “unintentionally” uploaded emails of nearly 1.5 million of new users, Facebook has now revealed that millions of Instagram passwords were stored on its servers in a readable format.

Last month, Facebook said that it fixed a security issuewherein millions of its users’ passwords were stored in plain text and”readable” format for years and were searchable by thousands of itsemployees.

   

The company on Thursday revealed that millions of passwordsbelonging to the users of its photo-sharing service Instagram were alsoexposed.

“We discovered additional logs of Instagram passwordsbeing stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impactedmillions of Instagram users,” said the social networking giant in anupdate.

“We will be notifying these users as we did the others.Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were notinternally abused or improperly accessed.”

Facebook had found that some user passwords were being storedin a readable format within our internal data storage systems.

“This caught our attention because our login systemsare designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable. Wehave fixed these issues and as a precaution will be notifying everyone whosepasswords we found stored this way,” wrote Pedro Canahuati, VicePresident, Engineering, Security and Privacy at Facebook.

A Facebook spokesperson admitted late Wednesday that emailsof 1.5 million people were harvested since May 2016 to help build Facebook’sweb of social connections and recommend other users to add as friends.

The revelation came to light after a security researchernoticed that “Facebook was asking some users to enter their emailpasswords when they signed up for new accounts to verify theiridentities”.

The social network said the contacts weren’t shared withanyone and were being deleted.

In March, a report by Krebs On Security claimed that around200-600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored inplain text and searchable by over 20,000 Facebook employees.

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