Facebook confirms hacking of 30 million accounts

Facebook confirmed that 30 million profiles were affected by a massive hack.

This security breach had been reported in September and the initial data was 50 million affected accounts. But this Friday, the social network updated the information and although the number is smaller, it was confirmed that the hacker was able to obtain basic personal information of all the accounts.

Guy Rosen, Vice President of Product Management at Facebook, explained in a blog post that in the case of 14 million profiles, attackers were able to access highly confidential data including gender, religion, current city, date of birth, devices used to log in, education, registered places, pages that follow and recent searches.

While in another 15 million accounts, hackers obtained only the name and contact details. And regarding the other million profiles, they did not access any information.

"On September 25 we determined that this was really an attack and we identified the vulnerability. In two days we stopped the attack and secured the accounts by resetting the access tokens for people who were potentially exposed, "the executive explained in the announcement. Tokens are equivalent to digital keys that keep people connected so they do not have to enter their password each time they use the application.

Rosen added that they are cooperating with the FBI investigation. "He asked us not to discuss who could be behind this attack," he said.

Facebook made available to users a web page where they can check if their accounts were affected and, if so, what information was exposed.



In this 2018, the social network of Mark Zuckerberg has dealt with scandals of data infiltration, cyber attacks and problems that compromise the security of his platform. For example, on Thursday, Facebook eliminated 559 websites and 251 accounts that would have been missing from the company's policies when spreading misinformation and spam.