A Newer Breach Accessed 50 million Facebook accounts
By MYBRANDBOOK
Just six weeks before the U.S. midterm elections another security blunder for Facebook. Hackers may have access above 50 million facebook user profiles without those user’s permission. Facebook said recently.
Hackers took advantage of a “vulnerability in Facebook’s code” that gave them access to special “digital keys” that keep people logged into their accounts without needing to re-enter their password. Getting these digital keys meant the hackers could then use those keys to “take over people’s accounts,” the company wrote in a blog post. The attackers could use the account as the original account holder,” said Facebook’s Guy Rosen.
“Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed,” the company’s blog post reads. “We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Friday that the company discovered the vulnerability on Tuesday and fixed the issue Thursday night. He said that it’s unknown if these hackers were able to successfully access personal data from Facebook users. A hacker threatened to delete Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page.
A Taiwanese “white hat” hacker claims he’ll broadcast himself hacking Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page on Sunday. Writing in a Facebook post to his 26,000 followers, Chang Chi-yuan promised to delete the Facebook founder’s account, and broadcast himself doing so on Facebook Live. Chang is a well-known hacker in Taiwan, according to Bloomberg.
This latest security issue, happening less than six weeks before the U.S. midterm elections, is certainly bad news for the company. Facebook stock is down more than 3 percent on the news.
Facebook says that it reset these digital keys for the 50 million affected accounts and for an additional 40 million accounts that were also potentially exposed to the vulnerability. As a result, those 90 million people will need to log back into their accounts the next time they want to use Facebook. (For context, that’s less than 5 percent of Facebook’s total user base, which passed 2.2 billion in June.)
Facebook is hosting a call with reporters at 10 am PT to discuss the breach. We’ll continue to update this story as we learn more. It’s also unclear who was behind the attack and whether or not it may have been politically motivated. “Our investigation is early and it’s hard to determine exactly who was behind this,” Rosen said. “We may never know.”
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