The social media giant Facebook has announced that it has suffered a massive cyber attack, resulting in 50 million users account impacted.
In a statement, the vice president of product management at Facebook, Guy Rosen said that hackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook's ‘view as’ feature which lets users see how their profiles look to others.
According to Rosen, the cyber attack was discovered on Tuesday after hackers exploited the vulnerability to steal access tokens of the targeted accounts, allowing the hackers to take them over.
At the time of publishing this article; the vulnerability was fixed and the ‘View as’ feature was temporarily suspended. However, as a security measure, Facebook is now resetting tokens of 90 million user accounts which will require users to log in to their accounts again. Upon logging back, users receive a notification explaining what actually happened.
This attack exploited the complex interaction of multiple issues in our code. It stemmed from a change we made to our video uploading feature in July 2017, which impacted “View As.” explained Rosen in a blog post. "The attackers not only needed to find this vulnerability and use it to get an access token, they then had to pivot from that account to others to steal more tokens."
Facebook has apologized to its users and also contacted informed law enforcement regarding the breach. If you are on Facebook, change your email and account's password as a security measure.
This is not the first time when Facebook has been targeted by hackers. In February 2013, the company released a statement admitting that it was hacked in when its employers accidentally downloaded a malicious malware compromising the site security. However, no user data was stolen. In August last year, hackers targeted Facebook-owned Instagram by stealing data of top celebrities and trading it on the dark web.
Source: HackRead.com
In a statement, the vice president of product management at Facebook, Guy Rosen said that hackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook's ‘view as’ feature which lets users see how their profiles look to others.
According to Rosen, the cyber attack was discovered on Tuesday after hackers exploited the vulnerability to steal access tokens of the targeted accounts, allowing the hackers to take them over.
At the time of publishing this article; the vulnerability was fixed and the ‘View as’ feature was temporarily suspended. However, as a security measure, Facebook is now resetting tokens of 90 million user accounts which will require users to log in to their accounts again. Upon logging back, users receive a notification explaining what actually happened.
This attack exploited the complex interaction of multiple issues in our code. It stemmed from a change we made to our video uploading feature in July 2017, which impacted “View As.” explained Rosen in a blog post. "The attackers not only needed to find this vulnerability and use it to get an access token, they then had to pivot from that account to others to steal more tokens."
Facebook has apologized to its users and also contacted informed law enforcement regarding the breach. If you are on Facebook, change your email and account's password as a security measure.
This is not the first time when Facebook has been targeted by hackers. In February 2013, the company released a statement admitting that it was hacked in when its employers accidentally downloaded a malicious malware compromising the site security. However, no user data was stolen. In August last year, hackers targeted Facebook-owned Instagram by stealing data of top celebrities and trading it on the dark web.
Source: HackRead.com
