# Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years — Krebs on Security

<https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of-millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/>

- Host: [krebsonsecurity.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/krebsonsecurity.com/)
- Saved: March 21, 2019 (2019-03-21T20:39:41Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/9f6923490694/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/9f6923490694.json

## What Jamie wrote

You could definitely put this in the bucket of 'Hey, people make mistakes'. I would be surprised if Facebook engineers intentionally stored passwords in plain text, but this data wasn't just sitting on a server somewhere.

> The Facebook source said the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. The source said Facebook is still trying to determine how many passwords were exposed and for how long, but so far the inquiry has uncovered archives with plain text user passwords in them dating back to 2012.

The article says "logs showed some 2,000 engineers" accessed this data. How is it that nobody reported this? It’s much more concerning to me that none of these 2,000 engineers seemed to see this as a problem.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT98: Weekly Thing #98 / Mar 23, 2019](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/98/), Notable Links 📌

## Same host

- [Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing — Krebs on Security](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/0cb4bfef23cf/) (krebsonsecurity.com, July 26, 2018)
- [Marriott: Data on 500 Million Guests Stolen in 4-Year Breach — Krebs on Security](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/4997e6b3d4e0/) (krebsonsecurity.com, December 3, 2018)
- [Payroll Provider Gives Extortionists a Payday — Krebs on Security](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/f847b37c9619/) (krebsonsecurity.com, February 27, 2019)
- [Spam In your Calendar? Here’s What to Do. — Krebs on Security](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/cf6cc18123f1/) (krebsonsecurity.com, September 5, 2019)
- [110 Nursing Homes Cut Off from Health Records in Ransomware Attack — Krebs on Security](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/7b5341578f7c/) (krebsonsecurity.com, November 24, 2019)

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of-millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/