A rather shocking vulnerability was uncovered by security researcher Brian Krebs, who reports that Facebook left the passwords of approximately 200 to 600 million users simply ‘stored’ in plain text.

A huge number of Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram users may have had their passwords exposed as the aftereffect of a disturbing oversight by the social networking company.

Facebook just previously learned of the issue this past January and has since affirmed the shocking security failure, yet persists it has fixed the issue and has not discovered any proof that the data was 'abused.'

Albeit all users whose passwords were exposed will be informed, the 'shocking flaw' comes so far another blow to the already melting away trust of numerous Facebook users in the midst of the two years of consecutive privacy scandals.

The firm is as yet attempting to decide precisely the exact number of passwords which were exposed and to what extent, assures a source at Facebook who cautioned Krebs of the issue in the first place.

 ‘It’s so far unclear what caused some users’ passwords to be left exposed. To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them, we estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users.'

            - Facebook released a public statement with Krebs' report and affirms that it revealed the plain text passwords amid a standard security review in January.

In any case while Facebook says no password reset is as such required, it will caution the users if their information has been abused or will be abused in any way, the security experts still recommend the users to change their current passwords.