After the news of the Adobe user account hack leaked out, it seems that every company is taking necessary measures to beef up online security system. Facebook's no expection. Th social network site has hidden the profiles of its users who used the same email and password for their Adobe account. To retain their account, all the users need to do is change their login passwords.
Almost 100 million encrypted usernames and password combinations were exposed in a file following a hack into Adobe's user account database. Apart from having extremely easy to guess username and password combination, users tend to use the same password for different services. This makes them easy prey, because if their account of one service is hacked, the accounts of other services automatically gets exposed.
Presently, the Facebook security team is mining through the data leaked from the recent Adobe hack and are trying to figure out users who used the same combination to log into Facebook and Adobe, and warn them accordingly.
Some users are already receiving messages like "Recently, there was a security incident on another website unrelated to Facebook. Facebook was not directly affected by the incident, but your Facebook account is at risk because you were using the same password in both places."
Facebook also explained how it is identifying the users with weak (or same) passwords. "We used the plaintext passwords that had already been worked out by researchers. We took those recovered plaintext passwords and ran them through the same code that we use to check your password at login time. Like the story indicates, we're proactive about finding sources of compromised passwords on the internet. Through practice, we've become more efficient and effective at protecting accounts with credentials that have been leaked, and we use an automated process for securing those accounts," said Chris Long a security incident response manager at Facebook.
