Here we go again, Facebook is taking the lion share in the media for negative reasons, more so than Donald Trump making the ‘loose lips’ President look like a saint. The latest in privacy gaffes, the social media network was found keeping 600 million passwords of users in simple text files..yes people in plain word documents! Oh and don’t worry only a few hundreds staffs were accessible to this useless data.
After the expose, Facebook came out to share its side of the story, as it happens during a routine security review in January, the company found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within its internal data storage systems. This caught their attention because the login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable, they have since fixed these issues and as a precaution will be notifying everyone whose passwords found stored in this way.
Facebook also claims that the passwords were not visible to anyone outside the organisation and no evidence were found of internal abuse or improper access of them. But then why would it have to notify hundreds of millions of its users about the passwords and have them change for safety. This is where the company ‘shoots itself in the foot’ yet again, being the mammoth size that it has become, Facebook is like Skynet, too vast is the network that no human can manage the system anymore. Old legacy programs and early day data storing system are forgotten during transfers leaving them for dust in some archaic storage, server or PC. A good founder would have been very meticulous about this as he or she would be sensitive about personal information and the responsibility of keeping them. Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg is not one of them, evident in all the fiasco his company is embroiled in, clearly our profiles are commodity to be milked for the highest profits.
To put in the latest bolt and lock after the horse had escaped the stable is what Facebook does, every time a leak or expose takes place, it will release statements about the latest encryption solution installed, state of the art password security software or best practices in place to keep data safe, the question is shouldn’t all this already be in place. IF we were to give you gold bars to store, you must have Fort Knox like facilities first before I can trust you with you with it. In this case the passwords were there for everyone to access for years, whether they were taken or copied is uncertain (Facebook can ascertain this), no leaks have been reported thus far, but all intelligent smugglers know how they should keep stolen goods for while until the smoke clears before selling them to the highest bidder.
