passwords of millions of Facebook users have been for the employees of the Online network in clear text accessible.

“We expect that we will notify hundreds of millions of users of Facebook Lite, tens of millions of other Facebook users, as well as tens of thousands of Instagram users,” the company said. Facebook have no evidence that someone internally handles abusive to it’s name. The passwords were also not for anyone outside of the company.

The affected users should, nevertheless, “as a precaution” to be notified, although there is no indication of a misuse of the data. The passwords would actually have to be internally unrecognizable. The error was noticed during a Routine audit in January. He had now been fixed – Facebook did not indicate when exactly.

Facebook Lite is a stripped-down Version for users of the Online network in regions with slow Internet lines.

Shortly before the Facebook message, IT was reported by security expert Brian Krebs in his Blog about the case. He wrote with reference to non-identified Facebook-Insider, more than 20,000 employees of the Online network may have access to the clear-text stored passwords. A total of 200 to 600 million, Facebook could be affected.

The archive files with non leierten passwords went back to the year 2012, it said in cancer. According to the log data of around 2000 developers have made about nine million internal queries for data elements, the exposed passwords included, wrote security expert, citing the company insiders. Facebook was initially no information.

dpa