The lead European Union Antitrust has fined social media giant Meta 91 million euros ($101.5 million) on Friday for inadvertently storing some users’ passwords without protection or encryption.<\/p>\n
The inquiry was opened five years ago after Meta notified Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) that it had stored some passwords in ‘plaintext’. Meta publicly acknowledged the incident at the time and the DPC said the passwords were not made available to external parties.<\/p>\n
It follows an investigation into Meta inadvertently storing certain user passwords in plaintext on its internal systems, meaning they were not protected by encryption.<\/p>\n
The issue applied to millions of Facebook and\u00a0instragram\u00a0\u00a0users.<\/p>\n
Meta Ireland notified the DPC of the breach in March 2019. The passwords were not made available to external parties.<\/p>\n
The DPC found a range of infringements of GDPR rules including failing to notify the commissioner of the data breach, failing to document the data breach, not using appropriate security measures to protect the passwords, and not implementing appropriate organizational measures around the confidentiality of the passwords.<\/p>\n
Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said: \u201cIt is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt must be borne in mind that the passwords the subject of consideration in this case are particularly sensitive, as they would enable access to users\u2019 social media accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The lead European Union Antitrust has fined social media giant Meta 91 million euros ($101.5 million) on Friday for inadvertently storing some users’ passwords without protection or encryption. The inquiry was opened five years ago after Meta notified Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) that it had stored some passwords in ‘plaintext’. Meta publicly acknowledged the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":26835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173,249],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50140,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50139\/revisions\/50140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}