It happened again. Facebook announced Friday that a security breach may have exposed the information of more than 50 million users. That number was later amended to 90 million. Were you impacted? What does it mean for you?
Here are three quick things to note.
- If you’re an admin of your credit union’s site, you may have been impacted more than others. That’s because the “View As” tool that allows you to see your site as a non-admin visitor would was exploited by hackers to exploit a vulnerability that exposed user tokens. That’s a fancy way of saying they were able to get your account information. Read how here. As an admin, you may have also been required to relink your page if you utilize a social media management tool like Sendible or Hootsuite.
- It isn’t just Facebook that was affected. In fact if you use the “Log in using Facebook” option on other sites, the convenience feature may have exposed your information. That’s one of the main reasons you may have noticed that you’d been logged out of Facebook on a device that normally remembers your password.
- We don’t really know how big this thing is. The vulnerability was introduced last summer— July 2017 to be exact — but was just discovered last week. While Facebook says they don’t think any private messages were sent and they feel like the data acquired was limited, we simply don’t know yet how much hackers were able to get.
A few more things to note. Facebook says they discovered the problem on September 27th. They aren’t sure yet if Instagram or What’s App were impacted. The FBI is investigating. For now, log out of all your devices, change your password and create a unique log in for each of the sites you visit. You should also consider turning on two-factor authentication. To see if your account was included, go to your page’s activity and check the history of logins.