Security breach affects Facebook users
50M accounts were accessed in hack by unknown attackers
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. Facebook 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 Friday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the comshaken Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s company discovered a security breach affecting 50 million user accounts. Users don’t need to change their passwords, the company said.
pany 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 have significantly
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 legitimately had 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.”
Facebook says it has alerted law enforcement.
Jake Williams, a security expert at Rendition Infosec, said the stolen access tokens likely would have allowed attackers to view private posts and probably to post status updates or shared posts as the compromised user, but not passwords.
“The bigger concern (and something we don’t know yet) is whether third party applications were impacted,” Williams said in a text exchange.
The Facebook bug is reminiscent of a much larger attack on Yahoo in 2013 in which attackers compromised 3 billion accounts.
Ed Mierzwinski, the senior director of consumer advocacy group U.S. PIRG, said the breach was “very troubling.”
“It’s yet another warning that Congress must not enact any national data security or data breach legislation that weakens current state privacy laws, pre-empts the rights of states to pass new laws that protect their consumers better, or denies their attorneys general rights to investigate violations of or enforce those laws,” he said in a statement Friday.