GDPR | Facebook slammed after staff given access to millions of user passwords

A wide-scale Facebook glitch exposed between 200million and 600million user passwords that were made searchable to thousands of Facebook employees – Krebson Security reported yesterday.

Other reports have suggested that some of the more severe data leaks date back to 2012. However, internal investigations carried out by the social media behemoth have, so far, found little to indicate that employees have abused access to this data.

The publication revealed that the firm has launched an investigation into a series of worrying security failures, in which employees were responsible for building applications that logged unencrypted passwords for Facebook users.

A senior Facebook employee, who remained anonymous, said that Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and was therefore searchable to around 20,000 internal employees. Threat Post explains that plain text means stored passwords are unencrypted and easily accessible by those who have entry to the firm’s internal data storage system.