EMERGENCY - FACEBOOK HACK
Updated: Oct 26, 2018
EMERGENCY BRIEFING
Earlier this morning, Facebook announced that 50+ million user accounts were affected by a security breach. The attacker exploited two bugs in the website’s ‘view as‘ feature, which shows the user how their page is displayed to others.
According to the Dark Web chat rooms monitored by Avantia Cyber Security US Partner: DOBs, education, home locations, and more, were gathered from these pages. Facebook has announced that they believe financial information was not accessed and they have since made the necessary patches.
90,000,000 users of the social media platform were logged out on Friday September 28, 2018. They received the following notification:
"Your privacy and security are important to us. We want to let you know about recent action we've taken to secure your account……...... Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed. We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based. We’re working hard to better understand these details — and we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change. In addition, if we find more affected accounts, we will immediately reset their access tokens.
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 90,000,000 individuals will have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login……. Facebook also advise:
"There’s no need for anyone to change their passwords. But people who are having trouble logging back into Facebook — for example because they’ve forgotten their password — should visit our Help Centre”
At this time, it is our advice from our US Partner’s ‘Real Time’ monitoring scans of the Dark Web that no Dark Web hackers or whistle-blowers are associating themselves with the breach, and there hasn’t been any mentions of leaked data in chatrooms/forums. Public Dark Web forums are mute as well. Our US Partner is continuously monitoring the situation, as the hacker group is most likely compiling this information to be immediately sold on the Dark Web, which could then be redistributed on numerous private and public data dumps websites. In spite of Facebook’s being in "denial" and that all is now good we advise ALL Facebook users to IMMEDIATELY change their Passwords and those of any of their Apps that use Facebook Login.
For Business Users we advise the do a device audit and turn on 2 Factor Authorisation if available - This major breach represents a clear threat to businesses worldwide as 3rd party Websites (like Facebook) are often accessed by employees at work – See below.
* Disclaimer: Avantia Corporate Services Pty Ltd provides the content in this publication to the reader for general information only and has compiled the content from a number of sources in the USA and up to 56 other countries who provide cyber breach information to us in real time. Given their international focus and experience in the cyberspace arena we believe their data to be accurate and reliable, however, we give no warranty (implied or otherwise), as to the contents accuracy or fitness for use. No validation or investigation has been performed by Avantia Corporate Services or the Author as to its accuracy or reliability. Readers should conduct their own investigation and come to their own conclusions before taking any action.