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21 Mar 2021 
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The security breach was exposed over the past year due to a scandal, from the disclosure that a British analytics company had access to private information of up to 87 million users due to concerns that misleading information on Facebook had affected the elections and even led to deaths in many countries.
Hackers detected the security weakness via the feature “view as” to get access to user accounts and take control of them. This functionality is for helping people to understand the level of confidentiality of their data. It also grants to people to view their profiles as someone else. So facebook’s official web site explained the technical problems.
50 million users are victims of the security breach: The security hole exploited by the hackers allowed them to obtain the connection tokens of the targeted users and to take control of their accounts. Connection tokens are like keys: in other words, they may have been able to connect to Facebook accounts. They are used by Facebook users to log into their accounts without having to enter their password. The Instagram accounts of the people concerned could also have been hacked. According to social media surveys, 50 million people are affected.
14 million users were affected by their name, contact information and sensitive information such as gender, relationship status and recent location records have been exposed. Attackers could access apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of other apps that give users a way to log in to their systems via Facebook.
Software bugs were especially embarrassing for a company proud of security engineering: the first two were introduced by an online tool designed to improve user privacy. The third version was introduced in July 2017 with a tool that aims to download birthday videos easily.
Facebook is already facing scrutiny of how it treats users’ private information meanwhile facebook’s policies via users are very strict about protecting users’ data indicating several sanctions toward anyone who breaks the rule and undertakes them, but Facebook failed in protecting users’ data and information and remain a promised land for hackers and unethical users.
Facebook’s CEO and workers have always the pride of expressing
In this scandal, the company was unable to determine the extent to which the attackers had access to third-party accounts. “Critics say the attack is the latest sign come to terms with its problems.” On the other hand, Facebook was affirming that the engineers in the company did their best for solving the problem, and even it has also released a website where users can check if their accounts have been affected by the security breach.
Solutions for the security breach: According to the IT specialists and managers the attacks that facebook is facing in recent years have been increased lately so the company must take preventive measures to reduce the security hole that the platform is coping with by : investing millions in cybersecurity and improving the algorithms that predict things like product and from just a Like users’ political preferences and wants. Increasing the number of security engineers and take serious acts towards unethical behaviors.