Facebook claims that 14 million accounts were stolen from a wide range of personal data: NPR

According to Facebook, 30 million users have been affected by a recent security breach, including 400,000 whose accounts were almost fully accessed and another 14 million who stole large categories of personal data.

Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images

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Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images

According to Facebook, 30 million users have been affected by a recent security breach, including 400,000 whose accounts were almost fully accessed and another 14 million who stole large categories of personal data.

Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images

Facebook confirmed that millions of users actually had access to personal data during a serious breach of security disclosed late last month.

At first, the social media giant estimated that 50 million accounts were affected by piracy, but it was not clear if information had been stolen.

Facebook has revised the total number of users involved to about 30 million. But he also confirmed that hackers had access to personal data in most cases, including about half of these users, recent searches and locations.

Facebook would not discuss a suspect or motive, at the request of the FBI. The office is actively investigating the violation.

As NPR has already reported, the hack exploited three separate bugs in the Facebook code. No password was compromised, but hackers were able to obtain "access tokens" allowing them to use accounts as if they were connected as another person. At the end of September, Facebook detected an unusual activity, discovered the bugs and disabled them.

Facebook explains that the attacks took place between 14 and 27 September. The attackers moved within social networks, first checking an account and then accessing the friends of this account, to initially steal access tokens for 400,000, and finally 30 million additional accounts.

Fifteen million of these users had their name and contact details (e-mail addresses or phone numbers).

Even worse, 14 million people had access to a wider range of data, including gender, religion, relationship status, birthday, city and hometown, device types, education, and age. employment history. Hackers also had access to the last 15 searches of these users and the last 10 sites in which they were logged in or which were identified by someone else.

The 400,000 people whose accounts were hacked for the first time were the most seriously compromised, with hackers viewing their posts, friend lists, group membership, and names of recent conversations (but in most cases, the content of these messages).

"We have no reason to believe that this information is of interest to the attackers," Guy Rosen, vice president of product management at Facebook, told reporters on Friday. "They were [doing] this in order to get the access tokens for the friends of these people ".

Hackers also had access to accounts of about 1 million users, but did not steal data, explains Facebook.

Users can check the Facebook help site to determine if their account has been hacked.

Facebook says it does not believe that the attackers created publications while imitating other users.

The company also said that hackers would have hypothetically been able to view the last four characters of users' credit card numbers, but there is no evidence that they have searched for this information.