Image credits to Facebook newsroom
Facebook is in the news once again, but for the wrong reasons. You have already seen plenty of Mark Zuckerberg memes online when he went to court last year, but this time around, it appears that your Facebook and Instagram passwords were exposed internally by Facebook employees and you might want to change it to a new one.
According to KrebsonSecurity reports, every Facebook user's password has already been exposed to Facebook employees in plain text since 2012. It was discovered by a team of Facebook engineers when they were reviewing a new code earlier this year. Oddly, since it was 7 years ago and if you had not been hacked, it pretty much tells us that the Facebook employees didn't even bother or they weren't aware of it before the recent discovery. Also, there's a good chance that you've changed your password a couple of times, so your old password is not the same as the new one. But if you're one of those who is still using the same password, you ought to change it now.
"We’ve not found any cases so far in our investigations where someone was looking intentionally for passwords, nor have we found signs of misuse of this data,” Renfro said. “In this situation what we’ve found is these passwords were inadvertently logged but that there was no actual risk that’s come from this. We want to make sure we’re reserving those steps and only force a password change in cases where there’s definitely been signs of abuse."- Scott Renfro, Facebook Engineer
In light of this, Facebook also just recently released a statement about Keeping Passwords Secure so you can have a read here. They have already fixed the problem and ensure that your password has always been masked outside of Facebook (except the early blooper which they discovered).
Well, it's good that they are being black and white about this. Anyway, it's also important that you shouldn't put all your personal information in your profile as well. Better be safe than sorry!
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