Attention FB & Instagram Users! MCMC Urges Public To Change Their Password

By Karissa Lund • 25 Mar 2019 in News

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The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has urged the public to change their Facebook and Instagram passwords, if they have received notifications to do so.

The press release that was shared on MCMC’s official social medias yesterday came out after Facebook noticed that hundreds of millions of user passwords have been readable by its employees for years. FB acknowledged this issue and informed to MCMC on Thursday 21 March.

“Any process to change the passwords should be done on their web pages or applications. This is important, as there is a possibility of parties that will try to take advantage of this situation to con people through deception, disguise and phishing,” they said.

If you didn’t know, phishing is cybercrime in which targets are contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords.

According to a security news website KrebsOnSecurity.com, they cited an unnamed Facebook source as saying the internal investigation had so far indicated that as many as 600 million users of the social network had account passwords stored in plain text files searchable by more than 20,000 employees.

MCMC said they would continue to monitor the situation, as well as communicate with the social media platform on any issues that could arise.

No worries though, as FB has confirmed that these passwords could not be accessed by outsiders and their staff hadn’t misused the passwords. But to be safe, they urge the public to change their password if told so.

Read the whole statement down below: