Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Says it Has Discovered 'Security Issue' Affecting Nearly 50 Million Accounts, Investigation in Early Stages (fb.com)
Facebook shared the following security announcement Friday: On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We're taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what's happened and the immediate action we've taken to protect people's security. Our investigation is still in its early stages. But it's clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook's code that impacted "View As", a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people's accounts. Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don't need to re-enter their password every time they use the app. Here is the action we have already taken.
First, we've fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement. Second, we have reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts we know were affected to protect their security. We're also taking the precautionary step of resetting access tokens for another 40 million accounts that have been subject to a "View As" look-up in the last year. As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login. After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened. Third, we're temporarily turning off the "View As" feature while we conduct a thorough security review. The company added it has yet to determine whether these impacted accounts were misused or any information was accessed. Senator Mark Warner has issued a stern reprimand to Facebook over the security incident revelation today. "This is another sobering indicator that Congress needs to step up and take action to protect the privacy and security of social media users. As I've said before -- the era of the Wild West in social media is over," he wrote.
First, we've fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement. Second, we have reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts we know were affected to protect their security. We're also taking the precautionary step of resetting access tokens for another 40 million accounts that have been subject to a "View As" look-up in the last year. As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login. After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened. Third, we're temporarily turning off the "View As" feature while we conduct a thorough security review. The company added it has yet to determine whether these impacted accounts were misused or any information was accessed. Senator Mark Warner has issued a stern reprimand to Facebook over the security incident revelation today. "This is another sobering indicator that Congress needs to step up and take action to protect the privacy and security of social media users. As I've said before -- the era of the Wild West in social media is over," he wrote.
Click like for bug, heart for backdoor!
Check your premises.
We're taking this incredibly seriously
True, got to keep up appearances so that their sheeple products don’t leave the site.
And that's why the only thing you use Facebook authentication for is Facebook.
ON DELETE CASCADE
Strange that one doesn't actually see the alert on FB itself....
As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook
Or, y'know, they could not do that.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Is this discovery is related to the cancelation of the live deletion of Zuck's account? Talk about just in time.
Captcha: astute
his announcement...
then subsequent cancellation...
followed very soon after by this disclosure.
did he get paid to keep to shut it down? or only a pinky swear not to prosecute so long as he never so much as pings facebook servers ever again?
Facebook is investigating how to patch the security vulnerability code named internally as "Users".
"We used to have this famous mantra ... and the idea here is that as developers, moving quickly is so important that we were even willing to tolerate a few bugs in order to do it," Zuckerberg said. "What we realized over time is that it wasn't helping us to move faster because we had to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn't improving our speed."
That was 2014. I'm guessing the codebase is now pretty monolithic. The "Move Fast, Break things" ethic isn't something you pull out of quickly.
a different way of selling data and disguising it as ((((theft))))?
We suck so badly at security that we deserve to be put in jail. We're waiting for you to pick us up.
Seriously, law enforcement? Police must now be facebook's bitch. Repeat: Do not use this shitbook.
Someone should rm-rf / their whole system. You know for the lols
I so wanted to watch that happen and then storm troopers immediately break down the door.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
www.facebook.com
I don't have to log back in to Facebook... I guess no one has viewed their profile as me. I guess I don't matter to anyone.
Big Subject, eh? Can I justify it?
Yeah, but I had to think for a second. The real value of this breach is that the hackers have some non-anonymous identities to abuse. If they were professional hackers, perhaps working for Russia or NK, then part of the motivation was limitations in what they can already do with fake identities (AKA sock puppets). Essentially it's a value proposition, where a real identity is much more valuable than a fake identity. It would be interesting to ask the hackers how much more valuable.
My initial reaction is that we need more data, especially about the timing. Facebook's response suggests that this attack may have begun months ago. If so, and if the hackers actually had millions of identities to play with, then we know they have been extremely careful in what they are doing with them. If they had engaged in any wholesale abuse, then Facebook would have been deluged with reports of suspicious activities.
Okay. Only more deluged than usual, but I still think it would have shown up more quickly.
But identity abuse is built on the foundation of fake identities of the anonymous stripe. I'm still advocating MEPR as the approach that could do the most to save Facebook from itself. It could even work on Slashdot, but there's no chance Slashdot could gather the resources to implement it. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
One more wrinkle from the vast world of Facebook abuse: Have the Facebook (and Twitter?) trolls started pre-blocking the people (like me) who advocate blocking trolls rather than playing with them? A block-first strategy? To evade detection or confuse the issue? It seems likely that Facebook notices accounts that get blocked too much, so perhaps the trolls have started a new rigging of the system, possibly even sharing lists of identities for mass blocking by sock puppets.
If my final speculation is approximately correct, then one of the most important forms of data the hackers could have obtained from the reported account breaches would have been the lists of blocked users. This is the kind of data that they could use quite surreptitiously to figure out (1) Who is blocking them and (2) How the blocking patterns are related to sock puppet attrition, the better to protect their hordes.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
But it's clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook's code that impacted "View As", a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else.
If you can pretend to be someone else, someone else should be able to pretend to be you!
See subject.
Facebook has several 'security issues', known as 'employees'.
Obviously a trend of missteps for Facebook. Or is it that other then lip service Facebook is only interested in how it can make more money off users information? At least for me I don’t include much personal information in my profile anymore and it’s locked down as best as it can be. But again maybe it’s just time to dump Facebook.
And deleting my account. Thanks for the heads up.
The malware is named Facebook.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Go view the source (luke) , on the client side its > half a million lines of javascript, just the activity pings alone measure in the MB, for a fucking newsfeed ?
shit code, written by shit programmers who haven't a fucking clue about programming for the web, they should be ashamed of their shite frameworks and every week it gets bigger as 20,000 programmers try to justify their existence.
shit laden on shit, its a wonder it works at all.
AC.
There's plenty of brain-dead people who have to come to me whenever Facebook decides to not log them in automatically, so if they now have to re-enter their password, I suspect a bunch of phonecalls soon.
If people can't even do that, they shouldn't be allowed on Facebook, much less the web itself.
Not just the app. Be. A. Man.
Ao, how long before that number triples or quadruples?
Seriously not shocked. Also, I haven't read enough about it yet to know if there should have been a test case for this in their test process.
It is not possible to cover everything all the time. So I'll reserve judgement.
Facebook is the security issue!
Keep using facebook you idiots! Some people never learn.
When the “View As” feature was developed, the motto was "Move Fast and Break Things." Should we be surprised that this feature is broken?
Clearly, moving fast is very important for any company that wants to be successful, but if you prioritize speed over security, it is going to catch with you later. Security bugs are different from regular software bugs in that you may never find out about them until serious damage is already done. Therefore the idea "let's move fast and fix a few bugs later" never works well when it comes to security.