Facebook users urged to change passwords

MANILA, Philippines — Social media company Facebook has urged its users to change their passwords after it discovered that hundreds of millions of account passwords were stored in readable format.

Facebook vice president for engineering, security and privacy Pedro Canahuati said the passwords were never visible to anyone outside the company.

Canahuati said they would still notify “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users” whose passwords were stored in the said format.

“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. This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable,” he said.

“We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way,” he added.

While no passwords were exposed externally and there is no evidence of abuse to date, Canahuati urged Facebook users to take precautions to secure their accounts, including changing their passwords.

He recommended avoiding reusing passwords across different services and picking strong and complex passwords with the help of password manager applications.

“Consider enabling a security key or two-factor authentication to protect your Facebook account using codes from a third-party authentication app,” Canahuati said.