Facebook, 30 million accounts violated: here's how to find out if you are among them

Two weeks ago, Facebook announced it had discovered an outbreak in its systems that allowed third-party users to steal data from millions of accounts, and over the weekend shared more data on what happened. At the moment it seems that 30 million accounts are compromised, and not 90 as previously thought. To recover data, hackers exploited a security flaw in the "View as" feature code, designed to allow users to see what their profile looks like from friends or strangers accounts. Taking advantage of the flaw, hackers have come into possession of user access tokens, or digital keys that allow you to maintain access on social networks.

According to Facebook, the attacker used a set of controlled accounts connected to different friends, using an automated technique to move from one account to another and collect security tokens during the month of September. Stolen posts published on the news feed, lists of friends, groups followed, and the name of the conversations on Messenger starting from the first 400 thousand violated accounts were stolen. To whom, among these, was the administrator of a Facebook page the content of the conversations was stolen.

After the first attack on the first 400 thousand users the hacker team managed to use the list of friends of the compromised accounts to access a total of about 30 million users. Among these, 15 million suffered theft of some information, such as e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, while for about 14 million users hackers have been able to draw on a number of information far superior, such as username, date of birth, type of device with which you are connected to Facebook, sex, location of access, status of the relationship, religion, city of residence and domicile, places where you checked in, education level, websites and pages visited , and the 15 most recent searches. About 1 million accounts were not obtained information.

According to what Facebook has announced it is possible to find out if your account is involved in the recent attack. To do so, simply click link HERE of the Facebook Help Center, and scroll down to the paragraph titled "Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?". The company also promises to eliminate the violated security tokens, if new ones are discovered, and to notify soon all the account holders who have been stolen by the access keys, explaining what information has been stolen and how to proceed to secure your account.The case investigations are currently underway by the FBI, which has requested the company not to disclose any information on the attackers.