Facebook: 50M user accounts affected by breach
NEW YORK — Facebook reported a major security breach in which 50 million user accounts were accessed by unknown attackers.
The stolen data allowed the attackers to “seize control” of those user accounts, Facebook said. It has logged out the 50 million breached users — plus another 40 million who were vulnerable to the attack. Users don’t need to change their Facebook passwords, it said.
Facebook says it doesn’t know who is behind the attacks or where they’re based. In a call with reporters on Friday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company doesn’t know yet if any of the accounts that were hacked were misused.
The hack is the latest setback for Facebook during a tumultuous year of security problems and privacy issues. So far, though, none has significantly shaken the confidence of the company’s 2 billion global users.
This latest hack involved a bug in Facebook’s “View As” feature, the company said in a blog post . That feature lets people see how their profiles appear to others. The attackers used that vulnerability to steal “access tokens,” which are digital keys that Facebook uses to keep people logged in. Possession of those tokens would allow attackers to control those accounts.
Specifically, from the “View As” feature, a bug somehow allowed a video uploader to appear for sending “happy birthday” messages, said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product management. Another bug then created an access token that made Facebook think the hacker had legitimately signed in with the account being viewed.
“We haven’t yet been able to determine if there was specific targeting” of particular accounts, Rosen said in a call with reporters. “It does seem broad. And we don’t yet know who was behind these attacks and where they might be based.”
News broke earlier that a data analytics firm once employed by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly gained access to personal data from millions of user profiles.