How safe do you feel being on social media? If you are on social media than you must have posted, shared, and viewed different stuff on it. Here, we are specifically talking about Facebook and it’s quite worrisome knowing that fifty million Facebook accounts got hacked recently.
Soon after Facebook found out the issue, the company launched its security update but what really looks horrible is what the security update contained.
Here’s what Facebook stated regarding the issue, “On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We’re taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what’s happened and the immediate action we’ve taken to protect people’s security”.
More clearly, attackers exploited Facebook’s code vulnerability that impacted Facebook’s ‘View As’ feature, which allows users to see what their own profile seems to someone else on Facebook. And, this allowed the attackers to steal Facebook access tokens which were used to intrude a huge number of accounts.
This news is deeply concerning. A full investigation should be swiftly conducted and made public so that we can understand more about what happened.
— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) September 28, 2018
Facebook VP of product management Guy Rosen said that 50 million Facebook accounts got affected directly and added that the vulnerability was used against these accounts. He again added that the attack was being used at a fairly large scale and attackers could use the accounts as if they are the account holders.
Similarly, Guy Rosen said, “Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information got accessed and we also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based.”
However, the company has already said that it has fixed the vulnerability thereby 90 million Facebook users found themselves logged out of their accounts or apps.
Facebook is engaged with law enforcement and has said that the users don’t need to change their passwords. But with all these things already going around, you may certainly want to do it and log yourself out of accounts from all devices. Facebook has also included this thing in its security update as, “[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.”
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