WASHINGTON: The world’s biggest social networking site, Facebook, has started scouring the web for stolen email addresses and passwords.
According to a study, almost three quarters of the web users use the same password for multiple accounts, which leave them prone to hackers as if one set of login credentials is stolen they can be used to access a wealth of private data.
Facebook Security Engineer Chris Long said that the administration has been struggling to cope with this problem and now the social network has started scouring the web for stolen email addresses and passwords. He said that Facebooko will check these credentials with those used to access the site, and if it finds a match, will warn the affected users that their accounts are at risk.
The site has created an automated service that monitors different ‘paste’ sites for stolen credentials, and watches for reports of large scale data breaches. It collects the stolen credentials that have been publicly posted and checks them to see if the stolen email and password combination match the same email and password being used on Facebook.
