The New York Times -The social networking giant said attackers had exploited a weakness that enabled them to hijack the accounts of nearly 50 million users. Here are some tips for securing your account.
Facebook said its engineers discovered a security weakness this week that could let attackers hijack people’s accounts. The vulnerability, which the company said had been fixed, affected nearly 50 million accounts.
Facebook said in a web post that the security issue was related to the “View As” feature, which allows people to see a preview of what their profile looks like to other people, like specific friends. Hackers exploited a weakness in the tool to gain access to digital keys that let people access Facebook from a personal device without having to re-enter a password. The keys could then be used to take over people’s accounts, the company said.
The social networking giant said that it had reset all the access keys for affected users and that those users would have to log back into their accounts. In other words, there is not much you have to do. But there are some precautions you should take to protect yourself from the attack.
