The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Meta €91 million for a 2019 incident wherein the company stored millions of Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain text.
I mentioned this in another comment too: Nobody seems to reads the actual posts, just the headlines. They were accidentally stored in logs:
As part of a security review in 2019, we found that a subset of FB users’ passwords were temporarily logged in a readable format within our internal data systems,
which is something I’ve seen at other companies too. For example, if you have error logging that logs the entire HTTP request when an error happens, but forget to filter out sensitive fields.
Considering how old Facebook is…. They probably never bothered to upgrade the authentication system because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and it didn’t matter to their revenue.
Facebook is huge and has very diverse teams/departments. It’s absolutely possible the guys who know what security is, and the guys who build app xyz are in different departments, countries, continents.
The capitalists want us to believe otherwise, but large corporations are just as convoluted and inefficient as a planned economy.
Considering how old Facebook is, you’d think they would have their shit together when it comes to password security…
I mentioned this in another comment too: Nobody seems to reads the actual posts, just the headlines. They were accidentally stored in logs:
which is something I’ve seen at other companies too. For example, if you have error logging that logs the entire HTTP request when an error happens, but forget to filter out sensitive fields.
Considering how old Facebook is…. They probably never bothered to upgrade the authentication system because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and it didn’t matter to their revenue.
At the time Facebook was invented, plaintext passwords had been a joke for years.
Password hashing has been standard practice far longer than Facebook has existed. Even by 2004’s awful, ‘archaic’ standards.
Facebook is huge and has very diverse teams/departments. It’s absolutely possible the guys who know what security is, and the guys who build app xyz are in different departments, countries, continents.
The capitalists want us to believe otherwise, but large corporations are just as convoluted and inefficient as a planned economy.
They are still on the old system of writing them down on paper XD