Facebook Inc. said Thursday that a security incident that exposed Instagram passwords internally was significantly worse than first thought.
After announcing in March that a security review had found that “tens of thousands” of Instagram users’ passwords had been wrongly stored in plain text, Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, security and privacy, said Thursday that the issue is now estimated to have affected “millions” of Instagram users.
Typically, Facebook and Instagram passwords are masked on the company’s internal servers so that not even Facebook employees can see them. In March, Facebook said the exposed passwords had been stored in logs accessible to some internal engineers and developers, and that the issue had been fixed. The updated information was added to a month-old blog post Thursday morning, shortly before the Mueller report was made public in Washington, leading someonsocialmediato speculate that Facebook was trying to play down the news.
In the original March announcement, Facebook said the password issue also affected “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users,” and “tens of millions of other Facebook users,” and that those users, too, would be notified of the incident.
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