When you sign up on Facebook, you are asked to create a password. Its job is to make sure that only you can access it, like a house's door that keeps strangers away. Knowing that you have this handy feature by your side, you started adding friends and scrolled through their posts. But how sure are you that no other people can use your password?
That is the question that ran through people's minds after Facebook discovered a security issue within their company.
Last January, some users' passwords were found readable inside the company's internal data storage systems despite their implemented masking method. Millions of passwords were seen in plain text and were visible to 2,000 engineers and developers. According to Brian Krebs, a web security researcher, the number of affected accounts is estimated to be around 600 million, which is a fifth of the platform's total population. This incident caused alarm for many since it left numerous accounts vulnerable to hackers.
In response to concerns, Facebook affirmed that nobody outside their teams utilised these data for illegal uses. They also stated that they have fixed the issue and will be informing users whose passwords were found in the listing. If this is the case, then they have a lot of work to do in the following weeks, since the number of accounts involved is estimated to be hundreds of millions (Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram). Despite this incident, they assured people that they would strive to further protect their users' personal information in the future by improving security measures.
Is Facebook new to this kind of issue? No. The platform has been on the hot seat many times already for different circumstances ever since its debut. But as one of the most popular social media site, these problems are starting to stain the company's credibility to keep its platform safe and stable. We do not know if any similar scenario will occur again in the future, but if it does, let us hope that the platform will be able to prevent such case from escalating into a bigger problem.
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