MCMC Advises Malaysians To Change Their Facebook And Instagram Passwords
Facebook accidentally left hundreds of millions of user passwords accessible to its employees for years.
By Katrina Khairul Azman — 26 Mar 2019, 04:37 PM
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) advises the public to change their Facebook and Instagram passwords if they have received security notifications to do so
"Any process to change the passwords should be done on their web pages or applications. This is important, as there is a possibility of parties that will try to take advantage of this situation to con people through deception, disguise, and phishing," read a statement released on Sunday, 24 March.
MCMC said that they will continue to monitor the situation and communicate with Facebook on any issues that may arise, The Star reported.
This comes less than a week after Facebook confirmed that it left hundreds of millions of user passwords saved in plain text format and accessible to its employees for years
Facebook discovered that 20,000 of its employees had access to users' passwords in the database during a routine security review in January.
According to a blog post by Facebook, the issue impacted "hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users."
However, the company's ongoing investigation indicated that the information has not been accessed by external parties
Facebook added that there is also no evidence to show that the passwords were abused by employees who had access to them.
"We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way," the post read.
