Welcome to Fire Direct

Facebook, is currently under cyber attack as a Taiwanese hacker named Chang Chi-yuan threatnened to take down Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page in a live broadcast before appearing to pull out of the plan.

Now, Facebook has issued an offical statement on the attack saying...

Our investigation is still in its early stages. But its clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s

code that impacted “View As” a feature

that lets people see what their own

profile looks like to someone else. This

allowed them to steal Facebook access

tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts. Access

tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.

 Here is the action we have already taken. First, we’ve fixed the

vulnerability and informed law
enforcement.

Second, we have reset the access
tokens of the almost 50 million
accounts we know were affected to
protect their security. 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 million people will
now have to log back in to Facebook,
or any of their apps that use Facebook
Login. After they have logged back in,
people will get a notification at the top
of their News Feed explaining what
happened.

Third, we’re temporarily turning off the “View As” feature while we conduct a thorough security review. This attack exploited the complex interaction of multiple issues in our code. It stemmed from a change we made to our video uploading feature in July 2017, which impacted “View As.”

The attackers not only needed to find
this vulnerability and use it to get an
access token, they then had to pivot
from that account to others to steal
more tokens.

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.

People’s privacy and security is
incredibly important, and we’re sorry
this happened. It’s why we’ve taken
immediate action to secure these
accounts and let users know what
happened. 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 Center. And if anyone wants to take the precautionary action
of logging out of Facebook, they should
visit the “Security and Login” section in
settings. It lists the places people are
logged into Facebook with a one-click
option to log out of them all.