Facebook left millions of passwords readable by employees

FILE- In this Aug. 21, 2018, file photo a Facebook start page is shown on a smartphone in Surfside, Fla. Facebook said Thursday, March 21, 2019, that it stored millions of its users’ passwords in plain text for years. The acknowledgement from the social media giant came after a security researcher posted about the issue online. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook left hundreds of millions of user passwords readable by its employees for years, the company acknowledged March 21 after a security researcher exposed the lapse. 

By storing passwords in readable plain text, Facebook violated fundamental computer-security practices. Those call for organisations and websites to save passwords in a scrambled form that makes it almost impossible to recover the original text.