EU Fines Meta $101 Million Over Password Storage

Ars Technica reports:

Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.

Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in a database that had been searched by roughly 2,000 company engineers, who collectively queried the stash more than 9 million times.

The commission has been investigating the incident since Meta disclosed it more than five years ago. The government body, the lead European Union regulator for most US Internet services, imposed a fine of $101 million (91 million euros) this week. To date, the EU has fined Meta more than $2.23 billion.

Read the full article.

Meta pays the price for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext https://t.co/lcsM2LORxH #cybersecurity #computerscience #computerengineering

— The Cyber Security Hub™ (@TheCyberSecHub) September 27, 2024