Facebook's security bods routinely trawl public "paste" sites for email addresses and passwords stolen from its users, as part of an effort to outfox wrongdoers trying to hack into personal data on the free content ad network.
However, the Mark Zuckerberg-run company was at pains to point out that the data-slurping battle with the dark web didn't lead to Facebook storing its users' passwords in plain text.
"Unfortunately, it's common for attackers to publicly post the email addresses and passwords they steal on public 'paste' sites," said Facebook security engineer Chris Long in a
blog post.
"Lots of household company names have experienced the unpleasant phenomenon of seeing account data for their sites show up in these public lists, and responding to these situations is time-consuming and challenging."
