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.
Also, nobody 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.
I worked at a company that handled sensitive data and we always had to pay special attention to logs in code reviews to make sure someone wasn’t inadvertently logging something that could potentially be private.
There’s sometimes cases people don’t think of ahead of time. For example if you log stack traces, they may contain details about the arguments passed to functions.
I once called my bank because I had trouble logging in. They didn’t outright say it but they implied that they could see my password and asked if I wanted to update it by telling them the new one. I said no.
2019 isn’t some ancient far away time though, it’s just a few years ago. If Facebook were doing stuff like this then, think who else is still doing it.
I’m sure we can just trust that it’s better now. The small dent fee that falls under the category of "write-off’ on Meta’s budget probably really straightened up their behavior…
Not to excuse them, but this is from 2019. Yes, that behavior was so outrageous at the time, but hopefully it is no longer happening
Also, nobody 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.
I worked at a company that handled sensitive data and we always had to pay special attention to logs in code reviews to make sure someone wasn’t inadvertently logging something that could potentially be private.
There’s sometimes cases people don’t think of ahead of time. For example if you log stack traces, they may contain details about the arguments passed to functions.
I remember my bank used to ask me for the 2nd, 5th and 7th letters of my password from time to time.
There’s only one realistic way they can know those to ask me.
They haven’t asked me that for a while now, so I can only hope they encrypted them properly at some point.
Encryption is reversible, hashing isn’t. That’s why you use the latter for passwords.
I once called my bank because I had trouble logging in. They didn’t outright say it but they implied that they could see my password and asked if I wanted to update it by telling them the new one. I said no.
And you can imagine someone thinking it’s super clever and secure.
2019 isn’t some ancient far away time though, it’s just a few years ago. If Facebook were doing stuff like this then, think who else is still doing it.
Probably is
I imagine the implementation would cost them more than the fine…
no… just… no.
I’m sure we can just trust that it’s better now. The small dent fee that falls under the category of "write-off’ on Meta’s budget probably really straightened up their behavior…