Facebook security breach affects 50 million users.

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Facebook made an announcement previously this week saying that a security breech affected 50 million user accounts on the social media network, this breech was caused by the new “view as” feature that let users to view how their profiles look like in other people accounts which allowed hackers to access and steal sessions and access token that can be used to successfully take over people’s accounts. The company however says that there is no need for the users to change their security settings or their passwords.

Access tokens are a set of code granted to a user’s device and the account after they have logged in hence does not require you to log into your account every time in the same device but just loads it for you hence hackers, hence the hackers used a series of steps hop, skip and jump to get these codes belonging to millions of users and started viewing users accounts as other users and because of bugs they were able to see the tool for posting birthday videos which it is not supposed to happen due to this bug hackers were now able to generate an access code that allows them to access users accounts.

Facebook then noticed a sudden spike of activities in September and began to investigate into the matter and after the European Privacy Law that was began to take effect early this year prompted the company to announce the breech in less than 72 hours after they have discovered it.

The social media network also announced that this breech also affected third-party apps linked to a Facebook account like Instagram hence the company logged out 90 million users as a security measure, the company reported the hacking attempt to the FBI and the Irish Data Protection Commission but they have not yet discovered who tried the hacking.

This news happens to come up just after there were questions on the ability to keep data of over 2 billion users safe where an institution in UK harvested data belonging to about 87 million users.