Facebook confirms that millions of instagram passwords were stored in plain text

Last March, Facebook announced that millions of Facebook passwords were stored on its servers in clear text and therefore visible and accessible to employees. Now, the company confirms that "tens of thousands" of Instagram passwords were also stored in the same unencrypted format.

Instagram, Facebook and their passwords unencrypted

Facebook has updated the original post in which last March it announced that millions of passwords were stored in clear text. In this new update, the world's largest social network, which has jumped from scandal to scandal in recent years, confirms that millions of Instagram passwords were also stored on its servers in a readable format.

Update April 18, 2019 at 7AM PT: “Since this post was published, we discovered that additional Instagram password records were stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue affected millions of Instagram users. We will notify these users as we did with the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not subject to internal abuse or improper access. ”

Despite the company's claims, and having previously demonstrated its low credibility, thousands of Facebook employees were able to access these plain text passwords. And although Facebook states that there is no "evidence to date" that someone has abused or improperly accessed passwords within the company, the situation is "highly worrisome", as stated by Juli Clever of MacRumors. The main reason for this is that short names can be sold for a lot of money, which makes Instagram passwords quite valuable.

On the other hand, the way and moment in which Facebook has made this new announcement are striking, in what seems to be a clear attempt to avoid the media. Facebook has revealed the discovery of new affected Instagram accounts by burying them in a month-old post and, as Recode points out, posts the update just before the Mueller report came out, to which the media would focus all their attention, as as has happened.

Via MacRumors Facebook Source