Facebook hack affected almost 50 million user accounts

Facebook was reportedly hacked on September 25th, 2018, leading to a security issue that affected almost 50 million accounts.

Facebook’s vice president of product management Guy Rosen confirmed the breach in a September 28th, 2018 Facebook media release.

According to Rosen, Facebook’s investigation is still in its early stages and it’s not yet clear whether any accounts were misused or if any personal information was accessed.

Rosen added that Facebook has yet to determine who is responsible for the breach, but that the company has already fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement.

Rosen said that the attackers were able to breach users accounts by exploiting a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that “impacted ‘Views As,’ a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else.” Facebook says that it has temporarily turned off the View As feature while the social network “conducts a thorough security review.”

Access tokens are like digital keys that keep users logged into Facebook so that passwords don’t need to be re-entered each time users access an application.

Facebook has reset the access tokens of the 50 million accounts that were definitely affected.

Additionally, Facebook reset the access tokens of 40 million accounts that were included in a ‘View As’ lookup over the course of the past year.

“As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login,” said Rosen.

“After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened.”

Facebook has spent most of 2018 fending off criticism about the company’s handling of a 2013 data breach that affected approximately 87 million users — including approximately 622,000 Canadian users.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously apologized for his company’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, even telling U.S. lawmakers that his own data was compromised as a result of Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan’s personality quiz.

News of the September 25th, 2018 breach also comes at a time when the company is facing intense scrutiny from privacy advocates, including a number of international lawmakers.

Facebook is currently under investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada for its handling of the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Earlier this morning, Facebook confirmed that it even reuses phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication to target ads at users.

Source: Facebook

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