Facebook Buys Leaked Passwords From Black Market, But Do You Know Why?

Facebook is reportedly buying stolen

passwords that hackers are selling

on the underground black market in an effort to keep its users' accounts safe.

On the one hand, we just came know that Yahoo did not inform its users of the recently disclosed major 2014 hacking incident that

exposed half a billion user accounts

even after being aware of the hack in 2014.

On the other hand, Facebook takes every single measure to protect its users' security even after the company managed to avoid any kind of security scandal, data breach or hacks that have recently affected top notch companies.

Speaking at the Web Summit 2016 technology conference in Portugal, Facebook CSO

Alex Stamos

said that over 1.3 Billion people use Facebook every day, and keeping them secure is building attack-proof software to keep out hackers, but keeping them safe is actually a huge task.

Stamos said there is a difference between 'security' and 'safety,' as he believes that his team can "

build perfectly secure software and yet people can still get hurt

."

Stamos was former Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo who left the company in 2015 after discovering that its Chief Executive Marissa Mayer authorized the government surveillance program.

Stamos joined Facebook in summer 2015 and now leads the security team at the social network. He said that the biggest headache he deals there with is caused by passwords users keep securing their accounts.

"

The reuse of passwords is the No. 1 cause of harm on the internet

," said the security chief.

According to him, the username and password system that was initially introduced in the 1970’s will not help us now in 2016.

As CNET

reports

, when passwords are stolen in masses and traded on the black market, it becomes apparent just how many of users are choosing the

weakest passwords

, such as 12345 and password, to secure their online accounts, automatically making their account more vulnerable to being hacked.

And this issue is something the social network giant is keen to help its users avoid.

In an attempt to check that its users are not making use of these

commonly used passwords

for their Facebook accounts, Stamos disclosed that the company buys passwords from the black market and then cross-references them with encrypted passwords used on its site.

Stamos said that the social network then alerts tens of millions of users that their passwords needed changing as they were not strong enough to protect their accounts.

from The Hacker News http://thehackernews.com/2016/11/facebook-acccount-password.html