Millions of Instagram passwords are exposed by Facebook

On April 19, Facebook admitted that it has unintentionally uploaded around 1.5million email ID of new users. Now the company has disclosed that millions of Instagram passwords which are stored on the database of Instagram are in a readable format.

Facebook didn't post another blog to announce this piece of information, instead, the company chose to disclose the findings by posting it on an old post.

"we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed," Facebook updated the old blog post.

Back in March last month, Facebook announced in a blog post that it has resolved the security flaw in which millions of users' passwords were saved in the plain text and readable format.

"In line with security best practices, Facebook masks people's passwords when they create an account so that no one at the company can see them. In security terms, we "hash" and "salt" the passwords, including using a function called "scrypt" as well as a cryptographic key that lets us irreversibly replace your actual password with a random set of characters. With this technique, we can validate that a person is logging in with the correct password without actually having to store the password in plain text," reads the post.

Let's see how the social media giant will deal with this security flaw and what legal actions are going to be taken against the company in the near future.