The company found the security failure during a review in January.
Facebook announced Thursday that the company stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text, allowing employees to read user passwords. The company said it discovered the security problem in January while conducting a review.
When asked by Newsweek why the company had not publicized the security concerns in January, a spokesperson said,"We initially found some passwords as part of a routine security review in January, which prompted us to conduct a more in-depth security review across our platforms to look for similar issues. Given that these passwords were stored incidentally across a variety of systems and under particular circumstances, this has taken us some time to complete.
The company announcement followed a report from security researcher Brian Krebs, who wrote that between 200,000 and 600,000 Facebook users had their passwords stored in plain text as early as 2012, citing an anonymous source from Facebook.Newsweek reached out to the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at MIT for comment on the risk of the security breach and whether users should change their passwords but had not heard back by time of publication.
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