Facebook, the worlds leading social media giant has made it official that only 30 million users fell vulnerable to the recent Cyber Attack disclosed two weeks ago. The Mark Zuckerberg led company says that the Sept’18 Cyber attack exposed data of only 30m users unlike 50m as reported earlier and added that there was “ No evidence” that the data had been used to target individuals or was being sold on the darknet.
Now, to those who are interested in knowing whether their account details were compromised, here’s a help. Just visit the Facebook “Help Center” page to see whether their account details were compromised. The help page will also disclose the data about the info stolen from your account, including the last ten places a ‘User’ checked in, their hometown details and the last ten searches they made.
As the law enforcement authorities of the United States were informed about the hack, a detailed investigation is said to have been opened on this note.
Sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the attack was launched by hackers who held “Seed accounts” last year. It’s said that they used the initial accounts and a bug created a login to get into the Facebook code related to the “ View As” feature to access the profiles of friends which is believed to have been existing since July last year.
The same group of hackers is reported to have used the credentials to open profile pages of more than 30m Facebook users in September this year.
Prima Facie reveals that names, phone numbers, email addresses of more than 15m people could have been accessed so far. Additionally, usernames, gender, language, relationship status, religion, hometown, city, birthday, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, last 10 places they were tagged to, website search, and the most 15 recent searches made by 14 million people on Facebook was also marked.
The Telegraph reports that Facebook first spotted about the data breach on September 14 this year while auditing the traffic to its servers and came to a conclusion on Sept 25th, 2018 that their servers were under siege. On September 27th, 2018 they discovered the cause of the attack and chose to shut down the “View As” Feature and blocked the access tokens for those who were suspected to have been potentially exposed.
