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.
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.
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.
It seems like it was one of those old systems from the earlier days that somehow was overlooked. It’s not great but I understand how it happens if they didn’t have strong monitoring and system ownership.
These things are the other way around. The older something is, the more likely it is to find a bunch of questionable choices, spaghetti code, and security holes.
The questions I have surround the “since 2012” bit. FB exists since 2004, so what happened in 2012? Was it a data dump, a careless logger, system migration, or something else?
Considering how old Facebook is, you’d think they would have their shit together when it comes to password security…
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.
Password hashing has been standard practice far longer than Facebook has existed. Even by 2004’s awful, ‘archaic’ standards.
At the time Facebook was invented, plaintext passwords had been a joke for years.
They are still on the old system of writing them down on paper XD
That’s harder to steal/hack by someone across the globe.
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.
This is almost certainly the result of accidentally letting the passwords get into the logging infrastructure.
It seems like it was one of those old systems from the earlier days that somehow was overlooked. It’s not great but I understand how it happens if they didn’t have strong monitoring and system ownership.
These things are the other way around. The older something is, the more likely it is to find a bunch of questionable choices, spaghetti code, and security holes.
The questions I have surround the “since 2012” bit. FB exists since 2004, so what happened in 2012? Was it a data dump, a careless logger, system migration, or something else?
Careless logging is the one.