“Facebook dropped a bombshell on Friday when it revealed an unknown hacker had breached the site, compromising the accounts of 50 million users. The company's security team found three bugs were used in the attacks, saying they were used in combination to successfully break into Facebook accounts.” – Forbes
Facebook was hacked on September 28th 2018 over 50 million users were compromised
Facebook's statement on the matter ends with this;
“People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we’re sorry this happened. It’s why we’ve taken immediate action to secure these accounts and let users know what happened. There’s no need for anyone to change their passwords. But people who are having trouble logging back into Facebook — for example because they’ve forgotten their password — should visit our Help Center. And if anyone wants to take the precautionary action of logging out of Facebook, they should visit the “Security and Login” section in settings. It lists the places people are logged into Facebook with a one-click option to log out of them all.”
This is very concerning, where Facebook is currently spending 100's of millions of dollars creating and improving algorithms to censor the speech of conservative users on their platform, and spending millions of dollars on public service announcements and other public relations campaigns to explain why they need to censor conservatives. But then they have neglected to keep up with R&D of security procedures.
There are plenty of alternatives out there, but the most important lesson in this, is that a concentration of power such as this allows hackers to find bugs easily and attack millions of users at once. Rather than having to sift through and exploit one site after another, hackers only much exploit one site to have access to billions of users data.
I suspect that far more than 50 million users were affected though, we shall see as this all plays out. This only happened yesterday, and facebook says that they are still investigating the data breech.
“Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed. We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based. We’re working hard to better understand these details — and we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change. In addition, if we find more affected accounts, we will immediately reset their access tokens.”
Reference: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/
On many occassions, I have attempted to give advice on internet security over the years. From using VPN's, to using encrypted passwords, and to keeping the security up to date on your own computer.
However beyond that, and surely now that this has happened to facebook many people will be departing the platform and creating their own social media presence as I and billions of others have done over the years, I will give a few tips that I have learned over the years.
From a page that I created on our parent site Clovis Star Media, I will give you a few tips on securing your data.
Reference: https://opinions.clovisstar.com/website-information-security-and-website-tips/
In addition to the above, I will start out with saying first start with clearing all of the saved data on your browser.
This will remove any cached passwords, because the next step is to change your passwords on all of your accounts.
Reference this:
What is Cache, Cookies, and History and How Do You Clear Them
Clearing Cache and Cookies
Clearing Cache and Cookies Firefox
Clearing Cache and Cookies Chrome
Clearing Cache and Cookies Safari
As I said before, the next step is to now change all of your passwords.
The reason that we clear that cache and cookies, is to attempt to insure that you do not have any trackers in your browser, this is something that hackers use to exploit sensitive data. Clearing your saved data can remove these trackers if they exist.
I have used a program for years called CCleaner, this is a free program (and paid if you wish), and it helps make this process very quick and easy.
Reference: https://www.ccleaner.com/
Before changing your passwords, I recommend updating your anti-virus. You may need to install anti-virus if you do not have any.
Here are a few free anti-virus programs that you may want to look into. Some of these work on a variety of operating systems, such as Windows, or Apple, or Android.
Avast: https://www.avast.com/en-us/free-antivirus-download
AVG: https://www.avg.com/en-us/free-antivirus-download
Comodo Free Firewall and Anti-Virus: https://www.comodo.com/home/internet-security/firewall.php
There are also plenty of others. If you are running a Linux server for your website, you can also look into ClamAV (ClamScan): https://www.clamav.net/
Now to change your password:
How to Change Your Facebook Password – MakeUseOf
If you use the same password on social media as you do for your other accounts, DON'T, and also now change all of your other passwords too.
I have put a video together on some of my regular security practices;
Here is another article that I wrote up a few years ago;
Quick Lesson in Internet security
I mentioned earlier the use of a VPN, so that hackers do no get your direct IP address, this is covered somewhat in the link above.
Bless up!
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