Facebook Hack 101: All You Need to Know

While the world is in constant debate about the virtual giants exploiting the right to privacy of the cosmopolitans, there comes the news of one of the biggest Data Breach of the century. And such is the condition of the virtual world that the data breaches have become a frequent thing. In the last decade itself, there were more than 12 breached that were labelled as the “biggest breach of the century”. Few of them that affected millions were the Wannacry malware attack, Yahoo data breach and Adobe data breach.

Now, on 28^th September 2018, was again marked as a date when the latest biggest data breach of the century happened. And this time, the target is the silicon giant who is at the worst time of its period. Yup, the target was Facebook and this time, the figure is sky rocketing. More than 90 million accounts are affected and out of which, 50 million were hacked and 40 million accounts were rebooted. So that happened, let us understand how the hack happened, who hacked Facebook and what can be done by the users who are affected.

How did the Hack happen?

The hack happened due to the “view only” button that was a recent button feature added by Facebook. The hackers were able to target the code of this feature and get “Digital Keys” or more commonly known as the “Access Tokens.” The hackers were able to get access of the accounts with that and had access of all the personal information, messages of the users.

Who hacked Facebook?

The identity of the organization or individual who hacked Facebook is unknown. Also, the hack was so low profile that Facebook is not able to determine whether any of the accounts were misused or if the messages were sent from that account. Guess what, Mark Zuckerberg’s account was also affected.

What are the measures to be taken?

Well, the first question that pops in our minds is how do I know if my account was hacked or not? Well, Facebook is sending out notifications to all the users that are affected by the breach. So, if your account was affected, you might have got a notification. While Facebook says they have fixed the breach and have curate their code, they advice the users to sign-out from their account and re login. While they say there is no need for the users to change their password, tech experts say that there is no harm in doing so.

So, that is all you need to know about another “Biggest breach of the Century.” While we hope that the virtual world stays open for all, the Tech companies also have to make sure that they take all the necessary steps to ensure user privacy and set up such security parameters that there are no such “Biggest breach of the Century” in future.