Facebook has published a blog post in which it has revealed that up to 50 million user accounts may have been compromised in a data breach.
The breach was discovered by engineers at the company on Tuesday September 25th, and is the largest to have occurred in the site’s history.
According to the blog post, attackers took advantage of a bug in the site’s ‘View As’ feature, which allows users to view an account as if they were another user. The attackers then stole access tokens, which allowed them to remain logged into another user’s account, and any third-party applications that use Facebook as a login.
Facebook says that this security breach was patched last Thursday September 27th and all account holders who were affected were notified.
“We’re taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what’s happened and the immediate action we’ve taken to protect people’s security,” the blog post reads, adding that Facebook has reached out to law enforcement agencies following the breach.
The news is likely to add to Facebook’s woes as the company is already under fire for numerous issues, including misinformation, allegations it was used in election interference, failure to protect user data and hate speech that pops up on news feeds regularly.
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