Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text
Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text
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.
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Considering how old Facebook is, you'd think they would have their shit together when it comes to password security...
Facebook is huge and has very diverse teams/departments. It's absolutely possible the guys who know what security is, and the guys who build app xyz are in different departments, countries, continents.
The capitalists want us to believe otherwise, but large corporations are just as convoluted and inefficient as a planned economy.
Of not more. At least government gives some amount of insight and a chain of responsibility. Corporations are opaque and responsibility ends in an understaffed, underpaid "support" line.
Have you ever worked for government IT? Most of it is ages behind private sector.
I work in the private sector and our most essential systems run on Windows Server 2012. Because the installed applications can't be migrated to anything else. After a reboot, there's 21 scripts that need to be run in a specific order (with admin rights) to get the app running again. The frontend is an http webpage that's open to the world.
The supplier of the software is a huge global corporation, market leader in their field.
I'm not saying there isn't crap in the private sector, but in my experience government really sucks managing IT.
No. Large organizations suck at managing IT, simply because it's not crucial for them to keep it managed and they usually have enough institutional insulation to mitigate the impacts. Whether that insulation is money or disregard of the public doesn't matter all that much.
The difference is even this pittance of a fine wouldn't happen in a planned economy - it would be like the planners fining themselves.
What we're seeing here is a result of the amoral "beastly" types concentrating power. What you're suggesting is to intentionally concentrate that power from the start.
Facebook is a great example of democracy - the billions of people using it have effectively (in their voluntary ignorance) voted for it to be like this. These are the same people who would vote for policies in a pure democracy.
And you're ignoring what happens in the SMB space, where people aren't part of the corrupt circle.
You're welcome to start a small community anywhere in the US with a planned economy, as proof of concept.
You could call it.... A commune, to indicate its goals.
I mentioned this in another comment too: Nobody seems to 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.
These things are the other way around. The older something is, the more likely it is to find a bunch of questionable choices, spaghetti code, and security holes.
The questions I have surround the "since 2012" bit. FB exists since 2004, so what happened in 2012? Was it a data dump, a careless logger, system migration, or something else?
Careless logging is the one.
Considering how old Facebook is…. They probably never bothered to upgrade the authentication system because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and it didn’t matter to their revenue.
At the time Facebook was invented, plaintext passwords had been a joke for years.
Password hashing has been standard practice far longer than Facebook has existed. Even by 2004's awful, 'archaic' standards.
They are still on the old system of writing them down on paper XD
old system of writing them down on paper
That's harder to steal/hack by someone across the globe.
It seems like it was one of those old systems from the earlier days that somehow was overlooked. It's not great but I understand how it happens if they didn't have strong monitoring and system ownership.
This is almost certainly the result of accidentally letting the passwords get into the logging infrastructure.