Hackers gained access to 50 million Facebook user accounts

Facebook announced the discovery of another vulnerability, thanks to which hackers gained control of 50 million accounts. The company is still in the early stages of investigating this incident, and its employees announced that they have notified law enforcement authorities about the incident.

The company's official statement said:

On the evening of September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue that affected nearly 50 million accounts. We take this issue very seriously and want everyone to know what happened and that we have taken the necessary steps to ensure the safety of our users.

According to the company, hackers gained access to people's accounts due to flaws in the operation of access tokens, which allow you to stay online and eliminate the need to re-enter a password, and the code for the “View As” feature, which allows users to view their profile as another user sees it. 

According to Facebook, the bug has been fixed, and as a precaution, developers have reset access tokens for 50 million accounts, as well as for another 40 million that used the View As feature over the past year. According to the company, a total of 90 million accounts were forcibly terminated.

When the user logs back online, he will receive a notification about the hacker attack in the news feed. While the investigation is ongoing, Facebook will disable the View As feature. 

Since our investigation has just begun, we cannot yet determine exactly for what purposes the accounts were hacked and what information was available to the attackers. We also don't know who is behind these attacks. We are doing our best to shed light on these details as quickly as possible.

According to digitaltrends.com