“Some of the passwords had been stored in easily readable format in the company’s servers since 2012.”
A senior Meta employee put the count at up to 600 million passwords, searchable by over 20,000 Facebook employees. Meta disclosed it in 2019, and Ireland’s regulator took until 2024 to fine it €91 million. That works out to well under a dollar per exposed password. The going rate for seven years of plaintext is a rounding error and a reprimand.