Facebook Hack Exposes Info, 50 Million User Accounts ‘Directly Affected’
Facebook is on the hot seat again after a security breach exposed the personal info of 50 million users.
Did you have to log into your Facebook today? If so, this press release will explain why.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. [It's] clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted 'View As', a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts.
According to Guy Rosen, Facebook VP of product management fifty million accounts were "directly affected."
We did see this attack being used at a fairly large scale. The attackers could use the account as if they are the account holder.
Facebook says the investigation is just getting started so they can't yet determine whether the accounts were "misused" or if any information was accessed. What's even more troubling is they also don't know where the attack is coming from.
They did assure users that the vulnerability has been repaired and as a result, some 90 million users may find themselves logged out. You don't need to change your password, but logging out and logging back in would be the best safety precaution.
[If] anyone wants to take the precautionary action of logging out of Facebook, they should visit the 'Security and Login' section in settings. It lists the places people are logged into Facebook with a one-click option to log out of them all.
Read up on more about the security breach here.