Facebook hacked as up to 90m accounts are vulnerable

International Desk: Facebook has revealed that as many as 90 million accounts may have been hacked, due to a 'security issue.'

The issue was discovered on Tuesday, and has since been resolved - but Facebook admits that it doesn't know if users' details are safe.

Guy Rosen, VP of Product Management at Facebook, said: 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."

It is understood that hackers would have been able to access accounts on other sites where Facebook is used as the login.

People with affected Facebook accounts that are linked to Oculus or Instagram accounts have been urged to unlink them, and re-link them again.

But the social network has said no WhatsApp users were impacted.

Journalist Will Oremus posted on Twitter that Mr Rosen had told to him on a conference call that third-party apps could have been accessed by hackers.

It is not yet clear whether personal information of users has been abused.

While the investigation is still in its early stages, Facebook has revealed that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted the 'View As' feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else.

This allowed the attackers to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts.

Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.

Facebook has taken several actions to fix the issue.

Firstly, the vulnerability has been fixed, and law enforcement have been informed.

Next, Facebook has reset the access tokens of the 50 million accounts known to be affected to protect their security.

Source: Daily Mirror
 

risingbd/Dhaka/September 29, 2018/A K Azad