This sounds like a beautiful forgetting on the part of the major social network. According to a site specializing in cybersecurity, Facebook would simply have stored thousands of passwords on servers that would not have been secured. Luckily, nothing would have leaked for the users concerned by this flaw.
It was through a blog note that the social network confirmed that many passwords were not protected. The Krebs on Security site has launched the alert.
According to the article of the latter, it would be between 200 to 600 million passwords that did not benefit from secure protection. Indeed, these have been kept on plain text files, located on Facebook’s servers.
An existing gap since 2012 and corrected this year by Facebook
According to Krebs on Security, this situation has existed since 2012 and employees of the company could consult at their leisure.
For Mark Zuckerberg’s firm, the information was known as early as January of this year and was corrected thereafter. In an official statement, Pedro Canahuti, the company’s engineer and safety officer, said the data was never accessible to other outsiders.
According to the article of the specialized site, the users concerned would have used only the application Facebook Lite. Regarding these, the social network should not ask them to change their password. On the other hand, Facebook will send them a message notifying them that they are concerned by this security note.
The employees of the firm would have tried to access this type of request, without knowing if it was for the wrong reasons. After the rather complicated year 2018, punctuated by the scandal of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook is trying to restore its image to restore confidence to the public.