Thousands become millions: Facebook uses Mueller report as smokescreen for Instagram scandal
Facebook has been caught stealthily updating a weeks-old blog post regarding password security on Facebook and Instagram, on the same day the Mueller report was released.
The company admitted on March 21 that it had failed to securely store users’ passwords, logging them and storing them unencrypted in plain text. The problem was initially detected as far back as January.
File photo: © Energepic.com / Pexels
An hour before the Mueller report was released on Thursday, Facebook spin doctors amended the number of Instagram users affected from “tens of thousands” to “millions.” Quick maths.
“(Update on April 18, 2019 at 7AM PT: Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users,” Facebook wrote in the amendment.
“We will be notifying these users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed).”
https://twitter.com/Nextclouders/status/1119146522409488385
https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1119027466813702144
https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1118975475794231298
https://twitter.com/nickconfessore/status/1118987870998532114
Facebook did not confirm the exact number of affected accounts but did state that the number is not in the tens or hundreds of millions.
“This is an issue that has already been widely reported, but we want to be clear that we simply learned there were more passwords stored in this way,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement to the Huffington Post. “There is no evidence of abuse or misuse of these passwords.”
Facebook reaffirmed that there is no indication that the data was improperly accessed or abused, despite being accessible to more than 20,000 Facebook employees, adding that affected Instagram users will be notified that their passwords were improperly stored.
The news came the same day that it emerged Facebook had been accessing and storing 1.5 million users’ email contacts without their knowledge or permission.
Original: https://www.rt.com/news/456994-facebook-mueller-report-instagram-scandal/
Why on earth would FB need 20,000 employees? That makes no sense to me. FB is the new age tabloid. Junk junk low quality junk. All the users would be so wise to make the move to Steem.✊
It's not that surprising that Facebook is utterly incompetent...though this might go back to before they bought Instagram...I dunno... This sort of insecure password storage isn't exactly uncommon. If a company is ever able to do password recovery rather than reset, then they're likely storing passwords unencrypted. Thankfully that's a lot less than it was in the past.
Also not exactly surprising they would store people's contacts. To not do so, you're have to trust that they would delete them after having access to them, after constantly hounding you for them all the time to find your "friends".
Books could be written about their poor practices.
When are we going to learn from their mistakes? We are heading to an IoT world and we can't secure passwords of simple things.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't look human. I guess he have augmented himself slowly with robotic parts until one day he becomes fully robot.
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