As of the second quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.23 billion monthly active users. In the third quarter of 2012, the number of active users had surpassed one billion, making it the first social network ever to do so. Active are those which logged into Facebook during the last 30 days.
Facebook is already under heavy fire since the revelation that consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had misused data of 87 million Facebook users to help Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016.
And now, the recent revelation which was reported on Friday 9/28/2018, having a zero-day flaw residing in the “View As” feature located on users timeline.
The feature has been disabled and a reset done on compromised (50 million) accounts and other (40 million) accounts
What the view as a feature means on Facebook:
After clicking to view, Facebook will direct you to your Facebook page that people who aren’t your Facebook friends can see.
If you can see certain posts and photos, this means those posts and photos are available for public eyes because you posted with a public privacy setting.
Facebook has admitted that an unknown hacker or a group of hackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in its social media platform that allowed them to steal secret access token for more than 50 million accounts.
The vulnerability allows hackers to steal secret access tokens that could then be used directly access users’ private information without required their original account password or validating two-factor authentication code.
Attack was discovered three days ago (on 25 September) and an investigation is ongoing. Meanwhile, the vulnerability has been patched.
These recent revelation has once again underlined the failure of the social-media giant to protect its users’ information while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.
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