On Thursday, March 21st, 2019, Facebook announced that since 2012, hundreds of millions of user passwords were stored in plain text and accessible to more than 20,000 of the company’s employees. The announcement, made by Facebook’s VP of Engineering, was ironically titled “Keeping Passwords Secure.” As many as 600 million users may have been impacted.
Data breaches caused the number of consumer records exposed to jump 126 percent in 2018 over 2017. Facebook’s latest announcement marks the continuation of this disturbing trend in information security, and is just the latest in a string of Facebook data breach and privacy issues.
Protecting Your Online Accounts
Encrypting passwords is an elementary aspect of cybersecurity, so this latest blunder by Facebook is pretty inexcusable. If you have a Facebook account, change your password immediately. And, if you use the same password across multiple services, change them there, too.
If you are concerned that your personal information or passwords have been compromised in a data breach, check out some of our data breach resources below:
- Bringing Social Media Identity Monitoring into the IdentityForce Family
- Password Strength Test
- Data Breach News Summary (Table)
- 9 Tips for 2019 Data Breach Victims (Infographic)
- 7 Tips for Protecting Your Identity (Printable PDF)
- Risky Business: Data Breach Impact on Your Organization & Employees (Whitepaper)
