Mumbai, Sept 28 (IBNS): In an unsettling revelation, Facebook on Friday announced that about 50 million of its users' accounts have faced security breach.
Facebook said it has fixed the security breach.
The breach allowed hackers to take over a person’s account.
The company said it has informed the law enforcement authorities about the breach.
As a result of the breach, shares of the social networking site also declined about 3 percent.
According to reports, a loophole was detected in Facebook’s code for a feature called ‘View As’ that lets people to check what their account looks like to others.
The breach allowed people to steal access tokens -- digital keys that keep people logged into Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter passwords.
Once logged in, the attackers could take control, said reports.
In a statement to media, Facebook said: "This attack exploited the complex interaction of multiple issues in our code. It stemmed from a change we made to our video uploading feature in July 2017, which impacted ‘View As.'’’
"The attackers not only needed to find this vulnerability and use it to get an access token, they then had to pivot from that account to others to steal more tokens," it added.
Support Our Journalism
We cannot do without you.. your contribution supports unbiased journalism
IBNS is not driven by any ism- not wokeism, not racism, not skewed secularism, not hyper right-wing or left liberal ideals, nor by any hardline religious beliefs or hyper nationalism. We want to serve you good old objective news, as they are. We do not judge or preach. We let people decide for themselves. We only try to present factual and well-sourced news.