Facebook says it was hacked, nearly 50 million accounts affected

Heads up, Facebook users, because the mega social network was recently the victim of a hack.

Facebook announced today that on September 25th, its engineering team found that hackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook code with the "View As" feature, which lets you see what your profile looks like to other people. The malicious party stole access tokens that could be used to take over users' accounts.

The issue affected nearly 50 million accounts. Facebook says that it has reset the access tokens to all of the accounts that it knows were affected, and it's also taking the precautionary step to reset the access tokens for another 40 million accounts that have been subject to a "View As" look-up in the last year. If your account is one of these 90 million, you'll need to log back in to Facebook and any apps that use Facebook Login. After logging back in, you'll get a notification explaining what happened.

Facebook says that because it's only just started its investigation into the incident, it doesn't yet know if the affected accounts were misued or if any user information was access. It's also unclear who was behind the attack.

Facebook has fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement about the situation. Additionally, Facebook is temporarily disabling the "View As" feature while it conducts a security review.

Facebook says it was hacked, nearly 50 million accounts affected originally posted at http://phonedog.com