Facebook Exposed Millions of Instagram Passwords

Facebook has admitted that the social media giant stored millions of Instagram passwords in a readable and accessible format for its employees Facebook ha admitido que el gigante de las redes sociales almacenó millones de contraseñas de Instagram en un formato legible y accesible para sus empleados.

One day after admitting that "inadvertently" uploaded emails from nearly 1.5 million new users, Facebook now revealed that millions of Instagram passwords were stored on their servers in a readable format.

Last month, Facebook said it solved a security problem in which millions of users' passwords were stored in plain text and in "readable" format for years and thousands of employees could search for them.

The company revealed on Thursday that millions of passwords belonging to users of its Instagram photo sharing service were also exposed.

"We discovered additional records of Instagram passwords stored in a readable format, and now we estimate that this problem affected millions of Instagram users," the social media giant said in an update.

"We will be notifying these users as we did with the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not subject to internal abuse or improper access. "

Facebook discovered that some user passwords were stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems.

"This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable. We have solved these problems and, as a precautionary measure, we will notify all the passwords we find stored in this way, "wrote Pedro Canahuati, Vice President of Engineering, Security and Privacy of Facebook.

A Facebook spokesman admitted on Wednesday night that emails from 1.5 million people were collected since May 2016 to help build Facebook's network of social connections and recommend other users to add them as friends.

The revelation came to light after a security researcher noted that "Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they registered in new accounts to verify their identities."

The social network said that the contacts were not shared with anyone and that they were being eliminated.

In March, a report by Krebs On Security claimed that around 200-600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and more than 20,000 Facebook employees can search for them.