Instagram Leak: Millions Of User Passwords Exposed

Facebook continues to stay afloat in hot water due to a host of issues hounding it. Now, another issue has grown to a larger proportion: the social media admitted that it made the wrong estimate regarding the number of exposed Instagram passwords -- from “thousands” to “millions.”

The social media giant updated a March 21 blog post where it initially said that “tens of thousands” of Instagram users had their passwords stored in a readable, non-encrypted format, to simply say that it made the wrong estimate.

Now, it estimates that “millions of Instagram users” had their passwords stored in the same unsecured, highly accessible format.

“Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users,” Facebook explained.

Although the social media giant said these passwords, along with the hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite user passwords and the tens of millions of “other” Facebook user passwords, were not taken advantage of, the issue will still cause people to think that their security has been compromised.

Other security and privacy issues

Previous reports indicate that this leak isn’t the only problem Facebook needs to solve.

Earlier this month, about 540 million Facebook user records were exposed by way of Amazon’s Cloud servers. These records, which included user names, likes, reactions and comments, were exposed as a result of mass data collection.

While the issue with Amazon can be classified simply as a tech issue, leaked company documents showed something that’s far more troubling than a snafu: Facebook has been sharing private user data to companies that could help it gain an advantage over the competition.

These documents, which include emails, webchats, spreadsheets, presentations, and meeting summaries, showed how Facebook gave “friends” access to the private data it so proudly says it protects. Conversely, the company denies giving rival companies and apps access to the same data.

What’s more, the documents revealed that Facebook didn’t “sell” the data to the companies it gave access to. Facebook merely gave the data to Mark Zuckerberg’s personal friends, or to those who spent their money on the social network.