When hacking Facebook, hackers could gain access to user pages on other sites

The damage from the most massive Facebook hack, which affected at least 50 million accounts, could be even more serious. It turns out that the hack affected not only accounts on the social network, but also other sites where users log in using their Facebook profile.

Details

• The damage from hacking Facebook accounts could be much more serious than previously thought, writes Wired. Using a vulnerability in the code of the social network tool View as ( View as ), hackers could get access keys not only to the Facebook account of the person they are interested in, but also to the account of this user on other sites where he enters using single sign-on technology . This technology allows you to log into accounts on different sites using your profile in a trusted service like Facebook or Twitter, which saves you from having to re-authenticate.
• The company said that this is technically possible, but Facebook has no evidence that hackers actually gained access to external accounts. As a precautionary measure, the users affected by the hack have already been logged out on other sites, Facebook stressed.
• This situation returns to the discussion about the advisability of using single sign-on technology, which, on the one hand, is convenient to use, but on the other hand, creates a security vulnerability, writes Wired. “Opa is beautiful in the sense that a safe deposit box at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is much more secure than a safe at a local bank,” says the director of the Open Crypto Audit Project. “But the minus of this tool is that you can see when the resource through which you log in to other sites is hacked.”

What else became known about the hack

• How long hackers used the vulnerability that appeared on the social network in July 2017, the company did not report. Fourteen months is a long time to cause damage, Wired emphasizes.
• Among those 50 million users whose accounts were hacked are Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company's COO Sheryl Sandberg. The company believes that another 40 million users whose accounts were viewed using the View as tool last year could be at risk.
• According to Mark Zuckerberg, theoretically, hackers could have been able to write a post on someone's wall or see users' private messages, but so far there is nothing to indicate that they did this. "We don't yet know if user accounts have actually been abused," the CEO said.
• Lawsuits have already been filed against Facebook after the hack was reported. Social network users Carla Echavarrazh and Derrick Walker have applied to the California court. “It is shocking that after all the scandals around Cambridge Analytica and the company’s promises to better monitor the personal data of users, the social network again failed to protect the information of its clients from hackers,” said their lawyer John Yanchunis.
• The incident is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The company does not know who exactly could be behind the hack. Facebook itself has been investigating it since September 16, when it first saw an unusual surge in social network users. On September 25, engineers discovered the vulnerability itself.

Reaction

• The incident will give congressmen even more reason to tighten regulation in the field of protecting user data. Senator Mark Warner, in particular, called for a full-fledged investigation of the latest hack. “Today's announcement reminds us of the threat posed by individual companies like Facebook that collect a large amount of personal data about Americans without taking appropriate security measures. This is another indication that Congress needs to do something to protect the privacy and security of social media users,” the official said.
• The company may also face problems in Europe, where particularly strict regulations for the protection of user data (GDPR) apply.
• In addition, Facebook is still recovering from the scandals surrounding the social network's involvement in Russian interference in the US elections, as well as the leak of user data to Cambridge Analytica, because of which it became a defendant in several investigations.
• Due to the account hacking incident, Facebook shares fell by the close of trading on Friday by 2.59%, and the company's capitalization decreased by $12.6 billion to $474.8 billion. Zuckerberg himself lost $1.66 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index .

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Liana Faizova