Around 50 million of its users were put into cyber-danger by a mere security shortcoming, according to Facebook.
As per usual, the security breach’s aim was to harvest user’s accounts and to attain power over them. This was the result of a vulnerability exploitation of the “View As” feature, done by the cyber-criminals. The infringement surfaced on Tuesday and the multi-millionaire social-media platform instantly informed the police.
The “View As” privacy function helps a user to see what their profile looks like to other users, especially what information is open to their friends, friends of friends and public. “Access Tokens” are equivalent to digital keys which help the users to stay logged into their accounts.
Numerous bugs in the feature were the pathway for the attackers to steal the access tokens to get into people’s accounts.
The social-networking site’s vice-president of product management said that the fault has been corrected and that all affected plus some other accounts too are being reset to ensure further safeguarding. Also, the possibly affected users were urged to re-login on Friday, without any need to change passwords.
With over 2 billion active monthly users Facebook suffered a great shock when its share price plummeted beyond 3%.
The aforementioned breach would lead the attackers to hack into other accounts of people that use Facebook which comprises sites like Tinder and AirBnB to name a few.
The investigation has started pretty recently, hence which part of the world, those 50 million users come from, is a doubt as of now. If or not the accounts were misused and the information jeopardized is a question that prevails still.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of the platform were surely two of those 50 million preys. The culprit behind all these attacks is still behind the curtain.
It’s getting harder by the days for Facebook to persuade the statesmen and legislators into believing that they can protect their users’ data and with the increasing number of cyber-crime related to this social media platform the trust of the users is wavering.
There is a major requirement for Facebook to take such breaches seriously, tackle them powerfully and contrive plans for any further attacks that could harm the tons of data it possesses.
The only way to ensure the user privacy is limiting the access points for users and mending the features in a way so as to make them work parallel with data safety.
According to sources, attackers are easily captivated by vulnerabilities and hence Facebook turned out to be the intended objective of cyber-crime. People’s privacy and security are of utmost significance and it should stay that way.
