Facebook revealed nearly 50 million users were affected by a data breach. During the attack, which happened earlier this week, hackers had access to users' accounts through the "View As" feature in Facebook's code.
In a blog post published by Facebook's VP of Product Management, Guy Rosen, he said Facebook has since fixed the issue and got in touch with law enforcement officials to report the incident. They also reset the profiles for those who were breached in addition to 40 million other users "that have been subject to a 'View As' look-up in the last year." This means a total of 90 million people won't automatically be logged into their devices anymore which will force them to re-log back in. When they do, they will receive a notification about the data breach, but will not need to reset their password. However, if you forgot your password, Rosen urge users to go to their Help Center.
Facebook has also temporarily turned off the "View As" feature, which allows Facebookers to see their profile as if they were someone else.
"Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed," read Rosen's blog post. "We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based."
It continued: "People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we’re sorry this happened. It’s why we’ve taken immediate action to secure these accounts and let users know what happened."
This news comes a few weeks after Facebook notified four million users of another breach from myPersonality, an app that was taking users' information and selling them to third-parties. But these are far from the last data breaches the social media app had to endure which has caused a few celebrities including Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell to delete it.
