A flaw discovered on Facebook in January appears to have resulted in users' passwords being stored in plain text, allowing someone with access to the platform's systems to read and potentially use the passwords without having to decrypt them first.
Hundreds of millions of users of both Facebook and Instagramwere affected by this vulnerability.
However, according to security researcher Brian Krebs, what is most concerning is that the company stored these passwords insecurely since 2012.
Furthermore, almost 20,000 Facebook employees had access to the unencrypted passwords of approximately 200 to 600 million users because of this flaw.
A Facebook engineer, Scott Renfro, told KrebsOnSecurity that the company found no abuse of the flaw and while it notified users, it will not force them to change their passwords.
If you are among the people affected by this flaw and Facebook has sent you an update, it is important to change your password and enable two-factor authentication.
After all the criticism that Facebook has received over time regarding how it handles user security, and just a few weeks since the platform's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, posted a massive post about how Facebook wants to become a company focused on protecting privacy, it does not seem to have found the right path yet to achieve such a thing and earn the trust of its users.
