More than 50 Million Accounts Affected In Facebook Hack, Your’s Could Be Too

Twitter was ablaze with users commenting about how they had suddenly been logged out of their Facebook  apps. This seemed to be faced by a lot of users, and you might be one of them too. The reason is the latest breach into Facebook’s security system which affected almost 50 million accounts.

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The Hack:

The breach was detected by Facebook on 25th September. A hacker or some hackers had used a vulnerability in the code of the social networking giant to gain access to user accounts. This was done by gaining control of the access tokens for the accounts. The access tokens are basically what allow you to log int your mobile accounts without having to retype your password every time. An update to the video uploading feature in July 2017, led to this vulnerability and attackers only needed to find this out to get the access tokens to user accounts.

To combat this, Facebook immediately reset the access tokens of all the affected accounts and an additional 40 million accounts. This led to users being abruptly logged out of they Facebook and Messenger apps. Along with this, the company is also disabling the ‘View As’ feature in your account until it conducts a thorough security review.

What has not been answered is who the attackers were and what they used the accounts for. They could have used the accounts to change settings . It could have even been used to log in to third party apps using the accounts. The possibilities are many, but the company has still not found an answer to the question. However, it has added that no credit card information has been exposed.

Facebook is treading through rocky waters. Earlier this year, Facebook had a crisis which forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify in court. The company pledged soon after this that it holds the protection of user information above everything else. Although this is completely different, it is the users who are affected. With around 2.23 billion active monthly users, and the absence of a Chief Security Officer, its high time Facebook steps up its security game.