Page 24 - ARUBA TODAY

A24 TECHNOLOGY
Friday 22 March 2019
Facebook left millions of passwords readable by employees

By BARBARA ORTUTAY and passwords exposed inter-
FRANK BAJAK nally. He said he’s seen a
AP Technology Writers number of instances where
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — much smaller organizations
Facebook left millions of made such information
user passwords readable readily available — not just
by its employees for years, to programmers but also to
the company acknowl- customer support teams.
edged Thursday after a se- Security analyst Troy Hunt,
curity researcher exposed who runs the “haveibeen-
the lapse . pwned.com” data breach
By storing passwords in website, said that the situ-
readable plain text, Face- ation is embarrassing for
book violated fundamental Facebook, but that there’s
computer-security practic- no serious, practical impact
es. Those call for organiza- unless an adversary gained
tions and websites to save access to the passwords.
passwords in a scrambled But Facebook has had ma-
form that makes it almost jor breaches, most recently
impossible to recover the in September when attack-
original text. ers accessed some 29 mil-
“There is no valid reason lion accounts .
why anyone in an organi- Jake Williams, president
zation, especially the size of In this Aug. 21, 2018, file photo a Facebook start page is shown on a smartphone in Surfside, Fla. of Rendition Infosec, said
Facebook, needs to have Associated Press storing passwords in plain
access to users’ passwords left the passwords of some pany wants to encourage Facebook bought Insta- text is “unfortunately more
in plain text,” said cyberse- 600 million Facebook us- small groups of people to gram in 2012. common than most of the
curity expert Andrei Baryse- ers vulnerable. In a blog carry on encrypted con- Recorded Future’s Baryse- industry talks about” and
vich of Recorded Future. post , Facebook said it will versations that neither vich said he could not re- tends to happen when de-
Facebook said there is no likely notify “hundreds of Facebook nor any other call any major company velopers are trying to rid a
evidence its employees millions” of Facebook Lite outsider can read. caught leaving so many system of bugs. q
abused access to this data. users, millions of Facebook The fact that the com-
But thousands of employ- users and tens of thousands pany couldn’t manage
ees could have searched of Instagram users that their to do something as simple First artificial intelligence
them. The company said passwords were stored in as encrypting passwords, Google Doodle features Bach
the passwords were stored plain text. Facebook Lite however, raises questions
on internal company serv- is a version designed for about its ability to manage
ers, where no outsiders people with older phones more complex encryption
could access them. or low-speed internet con- issues — such in messaging
The incident reveals yet nections. It is used primarily — flawlessly.
another huge and basic in developing countries. Facebook said it discov-
oversight at a company Last week, Facebook CEO ered the problem in Janu-
that insists it is a responsible Mark Zuckerberg touted a ary. But security researcher
guardian for the personal new “privacy-focused vi- Brian Krebs wrote that in
data of its 2.2 billion us- sion “ for the social network some cases the passwords
ers worldwide. The secu- that would emphasize pri- had been stored in plain
rity blog KrebsOnSecurity vate communication over text since 2012. Facebook
said Facebook may have public sharing. The com- Lite launched in 2015 and

This image provided by Google shows the animated Google
Doodle on Thursday, March 21, 2019.
Associated Press
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) ture music style.” Bach’s
— Google is celebrating chorales were known for
composer Johann Sebas- having four voices carrying
tian Bach with its first artifi- their own melodic line.
cial intelligence-powered To develop the AI Doodle,
Doodle. Google teams created a
Thursday’s animated machine-learning model
Google Doodle shows the that was trained on 306 of
composer playing an or- Bach’s chorale harmoniza-
gan in celebration of his tions.
March 21, 1685, birthday Another team worked to
under the old Julian cal- allow machine learning
endar. It encourages users to occur within the web
to compose their own two- browser instead of on its
measure melody. servers.
Google says the Doodle The Doodle will prompt us-
uses machine learning to ers who are unsure of how
“harmonize the custom to interact with the animat-
melody into Bach’s signa- ed graphic.q