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Facebook (FB) said Friday that attackers have taken advantage of a "vulnerability" on its website involving its "View As" feature, affecting nearly 50 million users. Shares on Facebook were down almost 3% on news.
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The social media giant reported that his engineering team had discovered the problem on Tuesday. It allowed hackers to steal Facebook access tokens via the "View as" feature.
Tokens are essentially digital keys that hackers use to support user accounts. Access tokens have been described as "digital keys that allow users to log in to Facebook so they do not have to re-enter their password each time they use the app".
"We take this very seriously and want to let everyone know what has happened and the immediate steps we have taken to protect people's safety," said Guy Rosen, Vice President of Management. some products. Rosen said that the investigation into this case was still in its infancy.
Resetting 90 million Facebook accounts
Rosen added that the social media company has corrected the vulnerability and informed the forces of order. He also reset the access tokens for the 50 million accounts affected by the violation. The company has also reset 40 million access tokens as a precautionary measure.
As a result, the 90 million people affected will need to reconnect to their accounts, Rosen said. This includes all applications using the site login. He stated that the attack exploited the interaction of several problems in the site code. It is based on the changes made to the download of the video in July 2017.
"Since we have just started our investigation, we still need to determine whether these accounts were misused or whether information was accessed," Rosen continued. "We also do not know who is behind these attacks or their location, we are trying to better understand these details – and we will update this message when we have more information or if the facts are changing. "
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