Robinhood, a California-based financial services company that provides a popular commission-free stock trading app, informed some users that their passwords were stored in plaintext.
“When you set a password for your Robinhood account, we use an industry-standard process that prevents anyone at our company from reading it. On Monday night, we discovered that some user credentials were stored in a readable format within our internal systems. We wanted to let you know that your Robinhood password may have been included,” the company told impacted customers.
Robinhood says it has addressed the issue and claims to have found no evidence that the exposed passwords have been accessed by anyone outside its response team. However, “out of an abundance of caution,” impacted users have been advised to change their passwords.
The company has not shared any technical details on the incident and it has refused to disclose the exact number of impacted users.
The financial services firm discovered the password issue on the same day it raised $323 million. The latest funding round valued the company at $7.6 billion.
Google, Facebook and GitHub have also reported these types of incidents. Google told some G Suite users in May that their passwords were stored in an unhashed format since 2005, and Facebook admitted in March that it had stored the passwords of hundreds of millions of users in plain text.
GitHub last year instructed some users to change their passwords after a bug caused internal logs to record passwords in plain text.
Related: macOS High Sierra Logs External Volume Passwords in Plaintext
Related: Plaintext Passwords Often Put Industrial Systems at Risk
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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