A few days ago, a Facebook security team discovered a security hole that affected 50 million accounts.

The investigations into this are still in the early stages, as the Facebook Newsroom announces. So far it is only known that attackers exploited a vulnerability in the “Profile as seen by other users” function. Through this gap, attackers were able to steal the profiles' access tokens and thus take over the profiles.

Many users had to re-register this morning

The vulnerability has now been fixed and law enforcement authorities have been informed. The access tokens of 50 million users were reset, and the tokens of another 40 million users were also reset for security reasons. This is also the reason why many users had to log in again on their smartphones and PCs this morning.

The extent to which the affected accounts were misused is still part of the investigation, and it is not yet clear who is behind the attacks or where they came from.

No need to change password

These attacks only stole the access tokens, but password data remained untouched. However, if users who had to log in again this morning were unable to do so, these users should contact the Facebook Help Center . Users can also take precautionary measures in the “ Security and Login ” area.

UPDATE 9/28 10:55 p.m

Facebook is now notifying users of the security problem.

Screenshot mimikama.org
Screenshot mimikama.org

Facebook literally :

We may have recently logged you out of your Facebook account for security reasons. We discovered that on September 25, 2018, there was an attack on our system that resulted in the theft of Facebook access tokens. Access tokens are digital keys that attackers could use to take over users' accounts. By logging users out, we prevent attackers from using the stolen keys to gain access to the accounts.
We currently do not know whether users' Facebook information has been accessed. However, we would like to inform you here about what we are doing to protect your account. We are continuing to investigate the situation in detail and have already informed the authorities. If we find out that more accounts are affected, we will immediately log users out and let them know what happened.
If you are logged out, you will need to log back into your account to use Facebook and other apps that you logged in to with Facebook. There is no need to change your password. If you have trouble registering, we'll explain what you can do here .

 

 


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