Much like Brexit, chats around Facebook's privacy policies are as complicated as they are long. Following a report by Krebs on Security, Wired say the social media giant has acknowledged a bug in its password management system that caused millions of users' passwords to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform.
In short, this means you should change your password immediately.
Why? Because the plaintext could have been accessed by thousands of Facebook employees who could theoretically hack into users' accounts - with passwords available stretching back to accounts created in 2012.
Speaking of the bug, Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, security, and privacy wrote in a statement:
"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. 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 them."
He went on to add that Facebook has now corrected the password bug, and will notify the tens of millions of users that their passwords may have been exposed.
To change your password on Facebook desktop, go Settings > Security and Login > Change Password. To do it on the app, go Settings & Privacy > Settings > Security and Login > Change Password.
