Facebook on Thursday admitted that millions of passwords were stored in plain text on its internal servers, a security slip that left them readable by the social networking giant's employees.
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"To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them," vice president of engineering, security, and privacy Pedro Canahuati said in a blog post.
Meanwhile, facebook acknowledged that the gruesome video of the New Zealand mosque shootings revealed gaps in its handling of live broadcasts by users, but pushed back against the idea of setting up a time delay.
Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, said in a post late Wednesday that the company’s artificial intelligence tools had failed to catch the video of the terrorist attack in Christchurch last week that was aired live on the social media platform by the shooter. The 17-minute video shows men, women and children being gunned down in a mosque.
Mr. Rosen also said the video wasn’t prioritized for an expedited review when it was flagged by a user. That is because the user flagged the video after it ended, not during the live broadcast. In those cases, Facebook accelerates its reviews only if there is a report of a suicide attempt.
Recently, Facebook had said that its engineering team had discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. Due to a flaw in Facebook’s code, hackers were able to take over an account and use it in the same way you would if you had logged into the account with a password.
The company said it has now fixed the problem in its code and reset access tokens for those accounts – along with 40 million other accounts that were vulnerable to the flaw. .