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Facebook's recent series of management disasters continued, with the social networking giant reporting major hacking that affected up to 50 million people.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a press call that the company had "corrected the problem last night and took precautionary measures" to avoid further damage.
Hackers have been able to steal 50 million accounts, access tokens used to keep people connected to Facebook so they do not have to re-enter passwords, said Vice President Guy Rosen from Facebook. With access tokens, hackers can take control of a person's account, allowing them to do things like read personal messages, post comments, and share information with other users.
The attack is different from the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook, in which a university researcher created an app that collected information on Facebook and then sent the data to a political consulting firm, in violation of Facebook's rules. Although Cambridge Analytica employees were accused of using Facebook user data to send personalized messages to their opinions, the company never controlled Facebook user accounts without their knowledge.
On the latest Facebook data hack, Zuckerberg said: "The survey is still very early" and "we do not know yet if one of the accounts has been misused."
Rosen said that Facebook had notified the FBI and the forces of the order of the hacking, which he attributed to attackers who could exploit three separate software bugs within the Facebook web infrastructure. Rosen said the hackers were probably sophisticated, considering that they were able to discover the bugs, realize how they were connected to each other and carry out the attacks.
Still, Rosen said, "It's hard to determine who is behind all this."
"We can never know," said Rosen.
The latest hacking is another major faux pas for Facebook, which is trying to regain consumer confidence after several recent debacles. In addition to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, lawmakers have criticized Facebook for failing to prevent the spread of Russian-related entity propaganda ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections and face legal challenges related to
This week, tech news site Gizmodo and a team of university researchers reported that when Facebook users give their business their phone number for security purposes, online advertisers can use this information to send personalized ads. .
In addition, several senior executives recently left the social networking giant as it struggled to overcome recent controversy. These include Facebook security officer Alex Stamos, who left in August to join Stanford University, and director of communications and policy Elliot Schrage, who left in June.
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Earlier this week, Facebook's Facebook co-founders suddenly announced their departure, apparently because of disagreements with the Facebook management team taking more control of the popular photo-sharing app.
Meanwhile, Brian Action, co-founder of WhatsApp and former Facebook employee, also expressed his resentment towards Facebook executives during an interview with Forbes published this week on the company's growing influence on the courier application, purchased by Facebook in 2014 for $ 19 billion. Facebook executive, David Marcus, responded to Action's interview and called it "low class".
On the latest Facebook data error, US Senator Mark Warner said, "Congress needs to be more interested in taking action to protect the privacy and security of social media users."
When a reporter asked him why Facebook users should continue to trust the company after so many missteps, Zuckerberg reiterated that the company was taking safety issues seriously, correcting the latest ones. vulnerabilities and took additional precautionary measures.
"Security is an arms race," said Zuckerberg.
Facebook shares fell nearly 3% in mid-day Friday to $ 164.30.
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