Facebook buys passwords to keep us safe

One of the biggest threats to companies is data breaches. The alarming rate at which hackers have successfully targeted global tech firms to steal user data has resulted in companies scrambling to ramp-up security measures. Facebook has been working towards to ensure user-account safety and goes beyond merely creating secure software. The firm has reportedly been buying up stolen user passwords being traded in online black market.

Facebook’s novel approach is in efforts to ensure that accounts of users remain unbreakable. Facebook’s chief security advisor Alex Stamos explained at the Web Summit in Lisbon that keeping Facebook secure and ensuring user account safety are two different things.

“It turns out that we can build perfectly secure software and yet people can still get hurt,” Stamos said. For a data saturated company of its size and scope, Facebook has remarkably managed to avoid the kind of security scandals, breaches and hacks that have affected many other major web companies.

The reuse of passwords is the No. 1 cause of harm on the internet,” said the security chief. When passwords are stolen en masse and traded on the black market, it becomes apparent as to many of them using — “123456” and its consecutive numerical combinations which are the main culprits. If we are using one of these passwords, it automatically makes your account more vulnerable to outside attacks.

So to check that Facebook members are not choosing those commonly used passwords for their accounts, Stamos revealed. The social network purchases passwords which the hackers are selling on the black market and cross references them with encrypted passwords used on the site.

Facebook provides a whole bunch of tools for users to make the security on an account strong and impenetrable — ranging from two factor authentication to identifying faces of friends.

“Usernames and passwords are an idea that came out of 1970s mainframe architectures.” said Stamos. “They were not built for 2016.”