Plaintext Passwords
The basic best practice for storing user passwords is to scramble or encrypt them. Platforms, like most social media giants, do this to protect those passwords. But Facebook apparently missed this memo when it reportedly stored “hundreds of millions” of user passwords in plaintext — which means that they were completely viewable.
The passwords were stored in this manner for several years, too. According to the social media giant, about 2,000 Facebook employees had access to the plaintext passwords. But Facebook said that it had “no evidence” that those employees had abused or otherwise improperly used that access.