Facebook took swift action following an attack to their database that compromised around 50 million Facebook accounts.
The social media giant’s engineers discovered the breach last Tuesday, September 25 and were able to update, fix, and patch the breach by Thursday, September 27.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook said that they managed to fix it immediately. “I’m glad we found this and fixed the vulnerability. But it definitely is an issue that this happened in the first place. I think this underscores the attacks that our community and our services face,” said Zuckerberg.
The breach is considered as one of the most severe attacks in the history of Facebook as the hackers were able to steal “access tokens”, a security key that enables Facebook users to stay logged in without having to enter the password repeatedly.
Facebook has mentioned that it was the “View As” feature that was compromised. Introduced as one of the latest features in July 2017, the “View As” feature had three bugs which the hackers took advantage of according to The Guardian.
The attack follows a series of privacy issues Facebook has recently undergone, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal a few months prior.
