Facebook was HACKED.....again
Reportedly 50 million accounts were hacked
On the 25th of September, Facebook detected a breach in their system. The attackers had exploited a vulnerability which allowed them to steal user's access tokens and take control of around 50 million accounts. Facebook's Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and its European Vice-President, Nicola Mendelsohn were also hacked. The vulnerability came from changes Facebook made to their video uploading feature.
The company has reported that investigations behind the attack are ongoing and that they are yet to find out whether the hacked accounts were tampered with or not. As a security measure, on the 28th of September, Facebook reset the access tokens of around 50 million accounts plus another additional 40 million accounts for security concerns. This reset logged many people out of their accounts, which led to an influx of reports from users all around the world, stating that they were either unable to log into their accounts or were having trouble accessing the app and website.
The company claims that they will continue their search for compromised access tokens and immediately reset those which were breached. Facebook has already issued a statement on their Help Center site regarding the attack and what we as users can do in order to keep our accounts safe. These safety measures came all too late as, The Sunday Times, UK reported concerns over other third party accounts associated with individual Facebook accounts such as, your Spotify account or Uber account. Facebook could face the largest class action lawsuit ever over these events while a class action complaint has already been filed against the company in America.
At this point in time the best thing to do would be to do a spring cleaning of your account's security. Go into Settings -> Security and Login -> Where You're Logged In and remove all devices that are unknown to you. Enable Two-Factor Authentication and change your password to something more secure. This will provide you with better security during these trying times.