Facebook hack: 50m accounts affected by data breach
Social media giant Facebook yesterday confirmed it had been hit by a hack affecting millions of its users' accounts.
Attackers were able to exploit a vulnerability in its "view as" feature, leaving around 50m accounts exposed to hackers.
The breach was discovered on Tuesday and the police have been informed.
Facebook vice president of product management Guy Rosen said the issue had now been fixed and all affected accounts have been reset along with 40m additional accounts as a precautionary measure.
"Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed," Rosen said. "We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based.
"People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we’re sorry this happened."
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg were among the 50m accounts which had been exposed.
The "view as" feature lets people see how other users view their Facebook profile. Rosen said hackers found bugs which let them steal users' "access tokens" – which keep people logged in so they don't have to enter a password every time they use the app.
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