Facebook Dealing With The ‘Largest Security Breach In The Company’s History,’ At Least 50 Million Accounts Compromised

Bad news for Facebook.

According to this, there’s been another huge security breach. Hackers got to ’em, and at least 50 million accounts have been compromised. They’ve launched an investigation.

.@Facebook says it is dealing with the largest security breach in the company's history. The cyberattack, which happened Tuesday, exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. It's just the latest hack on the social media giant. @NxThompson is here with more: pic.twitter.com/w0xDsVPZc9

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) September 29, 2018

Facebook says hackers exploited a vulnerability in the “View As” feature, which lets you see what your profile looks like to other people. Attackers were able to steal Facebook “access tokens” or the digital keys that keep you logged into Facebook so that you don’t need to reenter your password every time you use the app.

The vulnerability apparently stemmed from a change made in July 2017 in the way video was uploaded on the site, which the social network says impacted “View As.” Having obtained such access tokens, the bad guys were able to steal more tokens.

You follow? If not, no worries. Facebook released a YUUUUGE statement on the matter. Here’s a good chunk of it:

On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We’re taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what’s happened and the immediate action we’ve taken to protect people’s security.

Our investigation is still in its early stages. But it’s clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted “View As” a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. 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.

Here is the action we have already taken. First, we’ve fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement.

Second, we have reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts we know were affected to protect their security. We’re also taking the precautionary step of resetting access tokens for another 40 million accounts that have been subject to a “View As” look-up in the last year. As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login. After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened.

Third, we’re temporarily turning off the “View As” feature while we conduct a thorough security review.

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.” 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.

Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed. We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based. We’re working hard to better understand these details — and we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change. In addition, if we find more affected accounts, we will immediately reset their access tokens.

Facebook profusely apologized for the breach.

“People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we’re sorry this happened. It’s why we’ve taken immediate action to secure these accounts and let users know what happened,” Guy Rosen, VP of Product Management stated. “There’s no need for anyone to change their passwords. But people who are having trouble logging back into Facebook — for example because they’ve forgotten their password — should visit our Help Center. And if anyone wants to take the precautionary action of logging out of Facebook, they should visit the ‘Security and Login’ section in settings. It lists the places people are logged into Facebook with a one-click option to log out of them all.”

We’re looking into Facebook's massive data breach. New Yorkers deserve to know that their information will be protected.

— NY AG Underwood (@NewYorkStateAG) September 28, 2018

NEWS: Facebook's Guy Rosen just confirmed that the breach would have allowed hackers to access not only your Facebook account, but your accounts on other sites where you used Facebook as your login.

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) September 28, 2018

Facebook's data breach just got substantially worse than initially reported. In a follow up call this afternoon, the platform revealed that if your account was impacted, a hacker could have accessed any account you log into using Facebook https://t.co/RIEHdQq8BZ

— WIRED (@WIRED) September 28, 2018

Not good. Not good at all.