rganizations can store account passwords securely by scrambling them with a cryptographic process known as hashing before saving them to their servers. This way, even if someone compromises those passwords, they won’t be able to read them, and a computer would find it difficult—even functionally impossible—to unscramble them. As a prominent company with billions of users, Facebook knows that it would be a jackpot for hackers, and invests heavily to avoid the liability and embarrassment of security mishaps. Unfortunately, though, one open window negates all the padlocks, bolts, and booby traps money can buy.

“As part of a routine security review in January, we found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems,” Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, security, and privacy wrote in a statement. “Our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable. 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.”

Canahuati says that Facebook has now corrected the password logging bug, and that the company will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users that their passwords may have been exposed. Facebook does not plan to reset those users’ passwords.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com