Facebook claims there is no evidence that third-party apps were affected by the recent breach of the service through the “view as” feature. The total number of accounts affected is more than 50 million, and Facebook has now reset the access keys for each account.
Guy Rosen, Facebook’s director of product management, explains that there is no evidence that access keys were used to log in to third-party apps. “All developers who use Facebook’s SDKs are safe, and those who frequently check their users’ access tokens are automatically protected once we reinstate the access tokens. However, since not all developers use our SDKs, and not all frequently check the validity of their access tokens, we are in the process of creating a new tool that will be able to check, and log out, where an old access token is used.”
Still, while no third-party app has confirmed whether this information is true, the negative effects of this breach are not over yet. Some reports indicate that well-known sellers on the dark web are selling Facebook logins, but it is not certain whether they are from this specific breach.
While the problem seems to have been resolved, there are still ways to re-compromise user accounts through phishing attacks. Such tactics have been used in the past and we should be quite careful, as accounts that were not affected by the recent breach may also be targeted.
Rumors suggest that the company could be fined up to $1 billion due to the European GDPR.
