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Facebook originally said 50 million accounts were improperly accessed In September, a group of hackers used a flaw in Facebook’s “view as” feature to gain unauthorized access to millions of accounts — and today, the company released its most comprehensive statement yet on exactly what data was taken as part of the breach. According to today’s statement, the hackers stole access tokens for 30 million accounts (revised down from an initial estimate of 50 million), allowing them to gain complete access to the profiles. Of those 30 million, the hackers accessed basic contact information (name and either email or phone number) for 14 million accounts, and additional information including gender, religion, location, device information, and the 15 most recent searches for another 15 million acc...

Forced to log out of Facebook? Here’s why. If you were forced to log out of Facebook , you aren’t alone. On Friday, Facebook announced that at least 50 million and potentially up to 90 million Facebook users had their data exposed to hackers in a breach involving the social media platform’s “View As” feature, which lets you view your own account as if you were someone else. The company stated in an official blog post that earlier this week, on Tuesday, September 25, it identified a vulnerability in its code that had been present and unnoticed for over a year. That vulnerability gave hackers the ability to “take over people’s accounts” by stealing their access tokens — basically, the “digital keys” that allow people to stay logged in for days, weeks, or months at a time. At the time o...

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50 million people affected by new Facebook data breach