The passwords of hundreds of millions of Facebook users were stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees for years, according to a report by KrebsOnSecurity. According to the report, Facebook is probing a series of security failures in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted passwords and stored them in plain text on internal company servers. It said that according to a source: The investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million users may have had their passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees Facebook is still trying to determine how many passwords were exposed and for how long, but so far the inquiry has uncovered archives with plain text user passwords dating back to 2012. KrebsOnSecurity said it spoke to a Facebook insider who said access logs showed around 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords. No evidence so far that data was misused, says Facebook In response to the report, Pedro Canahuati, VP engineering, security and privacy at Facebook, issued the following statement: “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. We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way. “To be clear, these passwords were never visible to…
