Hackers Took Over Nearly 50 Million Facebook Accounts! What Did Facebook Do?

On Friday, Facebook made a formal explanation saying that hackers gained access to digital login codes and took over nearly 50 million user accounts. And those accounts include Zuckerberg’s account too, according to New York Times.  They are still investigating but don’t know who the hackers are and if they misused or any information accessed yet.

Let’s see what happened in more details.

Facebook made it clear that the issue happened as attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted a feature called ‘’View As’’. This feature lets users see how their profiles look like from other users’ eyes. It allowed them to gain access to access tokens of Facebook, which are used for keeping users logged in to Facebook for them not to re-enter their passwords, and thus they took over nearly 50 million accounts.

What Actions Did Facebook Take?

As they say in their explanation, at first they fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement. Then they resetted the access tokens of the accounts that they know were affected. They also resetted access tokens of another 40 million accounts that’ve been subject to ‘View As’ feature in the last year. And as the third action they temporarily turned off the ‘‘View As’’ feature.

In the end of the formal explanation, Facebook say that privacy and security of users are incredily important for them and they are sorry for this issue happened.

You can reach Facebook’s explanation by clicking here.