The Vice President, Product Management of Facebook, Mr Guy Rosen, has revealed that the Facebook’s engineering team has discovered security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts.
According to him, investigation is still in its early stages and the company was taking the issue seriously and wanted to let everyone know what happened, and that immediate action has been taken to protect people’s security since Facebook had already fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement.
“But it is clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted “View As”, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens, which they could then use to take over people’s accounts. Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook, so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app,” he said.
He added that the company had reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts in order to protect their security. Facebook had also taken precautionary step of resetting access tokens for another 40 million accounts that had been subject to a “View As” look-up in the last year.
He said further that as a result, around 90 million people would now have to log back into Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login.
According to him, After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened.
“We are temporarily turning off the “View As” feature, while we conduct a thorough security review. 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. Since we have only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed,” he said.
Rosen said that the company does not know those behind these attacks or where they were based but it was working hard to better understand these details and would give update when it had more information, or if the facts changed. “If the company found more affected accounts, it would immediately reset their access tokens”.
“People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we are sorry this happened. It is why we have taken immediate action to secure these accounts and let users know what happened. There is no need for anyone to change their passwords. But people who are having trouble logging back into Facebook for example because they have forgotten their password should visit our Help Center. And if anyone wants to take the precautionary action of logging out of Facebook, they should visit the “Security and Login” section in settings,” he said.
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