Facebook has discovered a major security rupture that has affected nearly 50million facebook users along with the facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and the COO of facebook Sheryl Sandberg. The company said that these accounts could have allowed the attackers to take over. Facebook, which has more than 2 billion monthly active users, has since fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement, it said.
The attackers stole the facebook access tokens with the help of its “view as” feature which they use for taking over the people’s accounts. This “view as” features allows all the users to see whether their own profile looks similar to any one’s.
“We do not currently have any evidence that suggests these accounts have been compromised,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.
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Also the shares of facebook have fallen down more than3 per cent in trading thereby weighing on the major Wall Street stock indexes. Facebook has also reset the access tokes of these 50million users whose account has been affected and to be on safer side, the reset access tokens for another 40 million that have been looked up through the “view as” option over the last year.
The company also said that nearly 90 million people will have to log back in to Facebook or any of their applications those use the facebook credentials. Also, the company added that, Facebook would be temporarily disabling its “view as” function. Ex-content moderator sues Facebook, claims disturbing images gave her PTSD
He also said that, Facebook must continue developing more and more new tools in order to make these accounts more secure and prevent similar incidents.
The hackers even tried to make use of users private information that includes name, sex and hometown from the Facebook system. Facebook said that it does not know if the information from the affected accounts has been misused and accessed and is working with the FBI for conducting further investigations.
Mark Zuckerberg also assured the users that the passwords and the credit card information was not accessed.
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