Social media has become extremely popular over the years, providing users with an easy way to communicate with their friends and family. As social media users, we put a lot of faith and trust in these platforms to maintain the security of our private information. But what happens when our private information is mishandled? The reality is that these incidents happen and users need to be prepared. Yesterday, Facebook announced that it did not properly mask the passwords of hundreds of millions of its users, primarily those associated with Facebook Lite.

You might be wondering how exactly this happened. It appears that many user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram were stored in plaintext in an internal company database. This means that thousands of Facebook employees had access to the database and could have potentially searched through these user passwords. Thankfully, no cases of data misuse were reported in the investigation, and these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of the company. According to Facebook software engineer Scott Renfro, Facebook is in the process of investigating long-term infrastructure changes to prevent these security issues going forward.

According to Facebook’s vice president of engineering, security, and privacy, the company has corrected the password logging bug and plans to notify the users whose passwords may have been exposed. But what can users do to better protect their data when an incident like this occurs? Check out the following tips:

• Change your password. As a precautionary step, update your Facebook and Instagram passwords by going into the platforms’ security and privacy settings. Make sure your passwords are unique and complex.
• Use multi-factor authentication. While this shouldn’t be your be-all and end-all security solution, it can help protect your credentials in the case of data exposure.
• Set up a password manager. Using a password manager is one of the easiest ways to keep track of and manage your passwords so you can easily change them after these types of incidents occur.

And, of course, to stay on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, be sure to follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, listen to our podcast Hackable? and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

The post Facebook Users: Here are Proactive Tips to Keep Your Data Safe appeared first on McAfee Blogs.