New Details Show the Extent of Data Accessed During Facebook Breach

The Facebook hack saga continues as the social media company brings to light new details regarding the breach. Earlier this month, Facebook suffered a data breach due to a bug in its “View As” feature which was used to access user accounts. Initially, the company believed that 50 million users had their accounts accessed by bad actors. This Friday, the company made an update on the investigation regarding the scale and impact of the breach.

According to Facebook’s newsroom post, the actual number of accounts that were accessed is 30 million; 20 million less than the original assessment. The attackers used the friend list of 400,000 users to gain access tokens to the affected accounts. Out of the 30 million accounts accessed, 15 million had their name and contact details, such as phone numbers and email address, accessed.

On top of the name and contact details, another 14 million users had a wide range of personal profile information compromised such as the last ten places they checked in and Pages followed. Lastly, out of the 30 million accounts breached, only 1 million were spared from having their data stolen.

For 15 million people, attackers accessed two sets of information – name and contact details (phone number, email, or both, depending on what people had on their profiles). For 14 million people, the attackers accessed the same two sets of information, as well as other details people had on their profiles. This included username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches.

Source:Facebook Newsroom

To find out if your Facebook account was affected by the breach, the company suggest users visit their Help Center page.