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Caution: You need to change your Facebook, Instagram passwords ASAP

If you have a Facebook or an Instagram account, you must update your password as soon as possible as Facebook itself revealed on Thursday that another privacy mishap happened as regards password management systems.

Facebook said that around 600 million of users in Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram have their passwords stored in plaintext in an internal platform. This means that those passwords were unencrypted and thousands of Facebook employees could have access to them.

“This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable,” Facebook vice-president of engineering, security and privacy Pedro Canahuati said in a statement.

“We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way,” he added.

Canahuati said that the passwords can only be accessed by the employees of Facebook but they have “no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them”.

“We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users,” he added.

Because of this, Facebook has advised all of its users to change their passwords with something that is different from their other online accounts to avoid getting hacked.

They said that if they have a different password on Facebook, chances are hackers will have a difficult time to breach other accounts.

How to change your Facebook password on your desktop:
1. Click Settings
2. Go to Security and Login
3. Click Change Password
4. Type in a new password

How to change your Facebook password on your iOS and Android devices:
1. Go to Settings & Privacy
2. Tap Settings
3. Tap Security and Login
4. Tap Change Password
5. Type in a new password

How to change your Facebook password on your Facebook Lite Android app:
1. Go to Settings
2. Tap Security and Login
3. Tap Change Password
4. Type in a new password

How to change your Instagram password:
1. Go to Settings
2. Click Privacy and Security
3. Click Password
4. Type in a new password

Staff Report

The Filipino Times is the chronicler of stories for, of and by Filipinos all over the world, reaching more than 236 countries in readership. Any interesting story to share? Email us at [email protected]

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