After Facebook and Google, another firm has confessed incidental storage of users’ passwords in plain text. This time, it is the stock trading service Robinhood. As revealed by the firm itself, Robinhood stored customers passwords on their internal systems in plain text.
Robinhood Stored Customers Passwords
The financial service Robinhood recently admitted an inadvertent privacy breach of its users. As confessed, Robinhood stored customers passwords in plain text on their systems. The news surfaced online after the company began informing users of the incident.
According to ZDNet, the company discovered the security lapse earlier this week. They noticed some saved user credentials on their systems in plain text.
On Monday night, we discovered that some user credentials were stored in a readable format within our internal systems.
The firm suspected that the saved credentials might include customers’ Robinhood account credentials as well.
We wanted to let you know that your Robinhood password may have been included.
As a standard, the firm stores users’ passwords after hashing. As mentioned on the company’s website, the firm uses industry-standard BCrypt algorithm for hashing passwords prior storage. Moreover, they also encrypt other sensitive details before saving them to their systems.
Customers Advised To Change Passwords
As elaborated in the firm’s email notice, the incident did not directly affect the privacy of the customers’ credentials. They confirm no access to the stored passwords by any of their unrelated employees.
We resolved the issue, and after thorough review, found no evidence that this information was accessed by anyone outside our response team.
Nonetheless, as a precaution, they still advise their customers to change passwords.
Upon noticing the incident, the company quickly worked out to rectify the glitch. Besides, they also sent separate emails to the customers notifying them of the matter. As told to ZDNet, the incident affected some of the Robinhood customers only. However, the spokesperson did not mention any exact number of affectees.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.