A couple of weeks after Facebook revealed that it'd been hacked and nearly 50 million accounts were affected, the company has shared more details on the issue.
Facebook says today that while it originally estimated that 50 million people were affected by this hack, it now believes that about 30 million people actually had their access tokens stolen, which could be used to take over people's accounts. Of those accounts, the hackers accessed the name and contact details like a phone number or email address of 15 million people. For 14 million other people, the hackers also accessed information like username, gender, language, relationship status, religion, hometown, current city, birthdate, education, and work. The final 1 million people did not have any info accessed by the hackers.
If you've got a Facebook account, you can visit the site's Help Center to learn if you were affected by the attack. Facebook says that it plans to send personalized messages to the 30 million people affected in the coming days to explain what info the hackers might've accessed as well as what those people can do to protect themselves.
Facebook today also shed light on how it learned of the attack. The company saw an "unusual spike of activity" on September 14th and began investigating it. On September 25th, Facebook determined that it was an attack and identified the vulnerability, and then it closed that vulnerability two days later.
This is a pretty serious attack on Facebook, and while the actual number of accounts affected is smaller than originally thought, 30 million people is still a large group to have their personal info accessed. There's also a lot of important personal information that's been accessed by the hackers. If you have a Facebook account, you should definitely go to the site's Help Center to determine if your account was compromised.
