Facebook is under the spotlight again, this time for storing "hundreds of millions" of account passwords in plain text. Facebook confirmed it knew about the problem on Thursday after cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported on it earlier this week.
Facebook said the passwords could only be accessed by company employees and that an internal investigation "didn't find any evidence of abuse." But the news only makes matters worse for Facebook, which has repeatedly come under fire for its privacy and security measures.
Facebook reportedly discovered the problem in January during a routine security review. The social media company said it was surprised because its system is "designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable."
In a Thursday blog post, Facebook's vice president of security and privacy engineering wrote, "There is nothing more important to us than protecting people’s information, and we will continue making improvements as part of our ongoing security efforts at Facebook."
Facebook said it has fixed the problem and will notify affected users, including people on Instagram. It's unclear how many users were affected, but according to Krebs' report, an anonymous Facebook source said it could be anywhere between 200 million and 600 million people.
