Facebook Security Breach 2018: 50 Million Accounts Compromised

The latest Facebook security breach has placed the company in hot water once again as they admitted that over 50 million accounts had been compromised due to a security flaw.

The security breach was discovered on Tuesday, and it was fixed on Thursday. Hackers exploited a vulnerability in the feature known as “View As” to gain control of the accounts.

“This allowed them 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’s Vice President of Product Management Guy Rosen said in a statement on Friday.

Aside from the 50 million accounts that were affected by the latest Facebook security breach, the company also announced that they had to reset the access tokens of another 40 million accounts as a precautionary measure since they have been subject to a “View As” look-up in the past year. That’s 90 million Facebook users who are required to log back into their Facebook accounts, or any other apps that use Facebook login. Once users log back in, they should get a notification on their News Feed explaining the breach.

“I’m glad we found this and fixed the vulnerability,” Facebook chairman and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with the media on Friday, via The Guardian. “But it definitely is an issue that this happened in the first place. I think this underscores the attacks that our community and our services face.”

The latest Facebook security breach has already been taken care of by the tech giant. However, users are advised to change their password in case their accounts were hacked earlier this week. Better safe than sorry.