50 Million Facebook Accounts Have Been Affected By Security Breach

Facebook says almost 50 million accounts have been affected by a security breach, some of them in Ireland.

The company said the breach happened on the 25th of September in a feature known as "View As" to gain control of people's accounts.

According to BBC News, Facebook says it has informed the police.

Users that were asked to log-in today were potentially affected. However, Facebook says the users did not have to change their passwords.

The flaw has been fixed and all the affected accounts have been reset as well as another 40 million as a precaution.

Facebook would not disclose exactly where the accounts were but they have informed Irish data regulators because the European's subsidiary is headquartered here.

Facebook's Head of Security, Guy Rosen said, " 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. “

"People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we’re sorry this happened."

The 'View As' function allows people to see what their profile looks like to other people depending on the level of access they have and the level of security you have on your page.

There were multiple bugs found in this feature which, "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," he added.

Well, that does not sound good.