Facebook: 50 million accounts 'directly affected' by hack

A million hacked Facebook accounts isn’t cool. You know what’s even less cool? Fifty million hacked Facebook accounts.

A Friday morning press release from our connect-people-at-any-cost friends in Menlo Park detailed a potentially horrifying situation for the billions of people who use the social media service: Their accounts might have been hacked. Well, at least 50 million of them were "directly affected," anyway. 

The so-called "security update" is light on specifics, but what it does include is extremely troubling. 

"On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts," reads the statement. "[It's] clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted 'View As', a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts." Read more...