If you have a Facebook or Instagram account, you probably don’t want to know your password may have been easily accessible within the company.
“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,” according to a Thursday statement from Pedro Canahuati, the Vice President of Engineering, Security and Privacy with Facebook.
The passwords of “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users” were reportedly supposed to be encrypted — but weren’t.
The company says they have since fixed the problem and will notify the users who had exposed passwords.
“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,” the statement continues.
If you're concerned about your account security, you can change your password or enable two-factor authentication.
Read more about how Facebook protects passwords and how you can keep your account secure here.
