Find out if you have been affected by the recent Facebook hack
Last month's Facebook hack affected about 50 million Facebook accounts according to Facebook's official announcement on September 28, 2018.
Hackers exploited a series of bugs in Facebook's "View as" function that allows users of the site to view their profiles as public users. The function is handy as it allows users to determine what regular visitors to the profile page see to adjust the visibility of information accordingly.
The hackers gained access to "access tokens" which are used by Facebook and other authentication systems to determine whether the user is allowed to access certain content on the site.
That meant that the hackers did not gain access to user passwords and that it was trivial to shut them out.
Facebook disabled the feature after the hack and invalidated the method used by the hackers to gain access to account data.
The company updated the information that it revealed about the hack. Here is a quick summary of the updated findings based on Facebook's investigation of the incident:
- The hackers controlled a number of accounts on Facebook already and used an automated technique to steal access tokens of friends, and friends of friends, and so on. About 400,000 accounts were affected by this and the attackers managed to gain access to account related data including posts on timelines, list of friends, group memberships, and names of recent Messenger conversations.
- The attackers used some of the accounts to expand the hack and steal about 30 million access tokens from Facebook users.
- For 15 million hacked accounts, name and contact details were accessed.
- For 14 million hacked accounts, additional information such as username, gender, religion, relationship status, and other profile related information was accessed as well.
- For 1 million hacked accounts, no information was retrieved.
Facebook users who would like to know whether their account was affected by the hack can visit the Security Notice page on Facebook to find out about that.
Just open the page and scroll down to the "Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?". Users not affected should see the following paragraph on the page:
Based on what we've learned so far, your Facebook account has not been impacted by this security incident. If we find more Facebook accounts were impacted, we will reset their access tokens and notify those accounts.
Closing Words
Facebook users may want to check the security notice page to find out if their account was affected by the hack. (via Deskmodder)
Martin, I would appreciate that you do not censor this post, as it’s informative writing.
Onur, there is a misleading statement “[…] GIFs are animated images …”. No, obviously you don’t seem to have take much notice of what you were told back in March regarding; Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
For example, https://www.ghacks.net/2023/03/31/whats-gif-explanation-and-how-to-use-it/#comment-4562919 (if you had read my replies within that thread, you might have learnt something useful). I even mentioned, “GIF intrinsically supports animated images (GIF89a)”.
You linked to said article, [Related: …] within this article, but have somehow failed to take onboard what support you were given by several more knowledgeable people.
If you used AI to help write this article, it has failed miserably.
EMRE ÇITAK posts are useless because they are fraught with inaccuracies and are irrelevant.
AI is stupid, and it will not get any better if we really know how this all works. Prove me wrong.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IYl1sTIOHI
Martin, [#comment-4569908] is only meant to be in: [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/07/09/how-to-send-gifs-on-iphone-two-different-ways/]. Whereas it appears duplicated in several recent random low-quality non relevant articles.
Obviously it [#comment-4569908] was posted: 9 July 2023. Long before this thread even existed… your database is falling over. Those comments are supposed to have unique ID values. It shouldn’t be possible to duplicate the post ID, if the database had referential integrity.
Don’t tell me!
Ghacks wants the state to step in for STATE-MANDATED associations to save jobs!!!
Bring in the dictatorship!!!
And screw Rreedom of Association – too radical for Ghacks maybe
GateKeeper ?
That’s called “appointing” businesses to do the state’s dirty work!!!!!
But the article says itself that those appointed were not happy – implying they had not choice!!!!!!
Rreedom of Association is one of our most important rights. Some people think it’s Freedom, but no, I say Rreedom is far more important. There are many STATE-MANDATED associations that save jobs, that’s right MANDATED. I can’t name any of them, but rest assured they are bad, because saving jobs are bad, and people having jobs leads to dictatorship!!! Anyone who disagrees is too radical for Ghacks maybe, because I’m not sure.
@The Dark Lady,
@KeZa,
@Database failure,
@Howard Pearce,
@Howard Allan Pearce,
Note: I replaced the quoted URI scheme: https:// with “>>” and posted.
The current ghacks.net is owned by “Softonic International S.A.” (sold by Martin in October 2019), and due to the fate of M&A, ghacks.net has changed in quality.
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/02/microsoft-is-removing-wordpad-from-windows/#comment-4573130
Many Authors of bloggers and advertisers certified by Softonic have joined the site, and the site is full of articles aimed at advertising and clickbait.
>> ghacks.net/2023/08/31/in-windows-11-the-line-between-legitimate-and-adware-becomes-increasingly-blurred/#comment-4573117
As it stands, except for articles by Martin Brinkmann, Mike Turcotte, and Ashwin, they are low quality, unhelpful, and even vicious. It is better not to read those articles.
How to display only articles by a specific author:
Added line to My filters in uBlock Origin: ghacks.net##.hentry,.home-posts,.home-category-post:not(:has-text(/Martin Brinkmann|Mike Turcotte|Ashwin/))
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/01/windows-11-development-overview-of-the-august-2023-changes/#comment-4573033
By the way, if you use an RSS reader, you can track exactly where your comments are (I’m an iPad user, so I use “Feedly Classic”, but for Windows I prefer the desktop app “RSS Guard”).
RSS Guard: Feed reader which supports RSS/ATOM/JSON and many web-based feed services.
>> github.com/martinrotter/rssguard#readme
We all live in digital surveillance glass houses under scrutiny of evil people because of people like Musk. It’s only fair that he takes his turn.
“Operating systems will be required to let the user choose the browser, virtual assistant and search engine of their choice. Microsoft cannot force users to use Bing or Edge. Apple will have to open up its iOS operating system to allow third-party app stores, aka allow sideloading of apps. Google, on the other hand, will need to provide users with the ability to uninstall preloaded apps (bloatware) from Android devices. Online services will need to allow users to unsubscribe from their platform easily. Gatekeepers need to provide interoperability with third-parties that offer similar services.”
Wonderful ! Let’s hope they’ll comply with that law more than they are doing with the GDPR.
No, they didn’t lmao.
https://twitter.com/vxunderground/status/1706523877478670542
What does this article about Musk/Tesla have to do with computing, devices, phones?
More irelevant filler.
yeah sure… they are always the victims and it is only against them ????
Believe them 100% and never question anything. This lawsuit sounds like the type you heard when people were eating batteries.