A defect that was discovered on Facebook in January, seems to have resulted in users' passwords being stored in plain text. So someone who had access to the platform systems could read and possibly use the codes without having to decipher them first.
Hundreds of millions of Facebook and Facebook users alike Instagram, were affected by this vulnerability.
However, according to security researcher Brian Krebs, what is most worrying is that the company stores these passwords without security from 2012.
In addition, almost 20.000 Facebook employees had access to unencrypted passwords of about 200 with 600 million users due to this defect.
A Facebook engineer, Scott Renfro, told KrebsOnSecurity that the company did not find any abuse of the defect and, while alerting users, would not force them to change their codes.
If you are one of the people affected by this defect and your Facebook has sent an update, it is important that you change your password and enable two factor authentication.
After all the criticism Facebook has received from time to time about how it faces the safety of its users and just a few weeks since the CEO of the platform, Mark Zuckerberg, published a huge post about how Facebook wants to becoming a privacy-centered company, does not seem to have found the right way to do that and to gain the trust of its users.
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