Facebook share price down 1% after user passwords exposed

Facebook share price is down after another data breach issue. The social media app has to deal with users’ passwords being exposed without their knowledge.

How were Facebook users’ passwords exposed?

Facebook’s latest data breach happened when a security research blog discovered that 600 million users’ passwords were not encrypted and stored in plain text. The passwords could have been easily seen and searched by the company’s employees for almost seven years.

Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, security, and privacy, noted that the data breach was found as part of a routine security check.

‘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,’ said Canahuati.

Canahuati said that though the passwords were exposed to employees, users shouldn’t fear that they were misused by Facebook staff.

‘Our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable. 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,’ added Canahuati.

Facebook said that the corporation will notify the affected users, many of whom used the Facebook Lite app.

How will Facebook fix this latest data breach?

Facebook has faced many data breach issues over the past year. In the spring of 2018, the company faced scrutiny for a data mining scandal in which customers’ personal information was collected without their knowledge. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer, (CEO), of Facebook, pledged to act to preserve visitors’ privacy.

Scott Renfro, a Facebook developer, said that the corporation is working to address this latest security lapse.

‘This prompted the[Facebook developer] team to set up a small task force to make sure we did a broad-based review of anywhere this might be happening. We have a bunch of controls in place to try to mitigate these problems, and we’re in the process of investigating long-term infrastructure changes to prevent this going forward,’ said Renfro.