This post was made on 10/18/2018.
Facebook reported a security breach on September 25th that revealed personal information of over 29 million accounts.
This breach was caused by the “view as” feature which let users see how their profiles looked to other people. The reason this feature was so easy to manipulate was because of “access tokens” which grant temporary access to one’s facebook page. This allowed the hackers to use access tokens and take over Facebook pages, they would then target friends of the page they just took over as their next victim.
These hackers would disguise themselves as a digital marketing company and Facebook has claimed they are spammers and used their malicious ways to force themselves into random people’s accounts and take them over.
Facebook is currently working with the FBI to try and fix this. They have also stated “There is no reason to believe the breach was related to the upcoming US 2018 midterm elections.”
Facebook needs to get its computer security up to snuff if it’s ever going to prevent hacks like this from happening. Over the past few years Facebook has been involved in far too many security breaches and has seemingly learned nothing from each of them. I also think that we are going to see more and more radical political interference on social media platforms like Facebook as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections.
While it may be true that this hack was not directly related to the US midterms, it would be foolish to say that it has nothing to do with it at all. I’m sure some of these hacked Facebook pages are spreading political propaganda to divide the two main parties in the US. So if you do use Facebook alot, keep an eye out for propaganda that will try to reel you in and feed you false information to demonize the opposing party.
Source: Spammers Behind Facebook Hack
Cyberleech 