How to check what hackers accessed in your Facebook account

He said the FBI has asked the company " not to discuss who may be behind this attack" or to share other details that could compromise its investigation. He said attackers initially used accounts under their direct control, which they had likely created, to exploit the vulnerability in the "View As" feature and steal tokens for the friends of those original accounts. However, hackers apparently did not have access to any third-party app data. When Facebook disclosed the breach two weeks ago, company officials said they didn't know who was behind the attacks or where they might be based.

For another 14 million people, hackers accessed the same data along with other profile information like "username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birth date, device types used to access Facebook, education, work", he said. Facebook discovered the attack September 25.

"We don't have a specific indication as to the intention of the hackers", said Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of product management.

It said: 'On the afternoon of Tuesday, 25 September, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting nearly 50 million accounts. Earlier this week the company said it had purged roughly 800 accounts and publishers that were sending out politically-motivated spam about the upcoming USA midterm elections, sparking renewed controversy that Facebook is censoring political speech. He said Facebook is looking into the possibility of smaller scale attacks. To start, Facebook recounts the past hack, starting with the code that was available between June 2017 and September 2018.

But Facebook is also describing some of the data that was accessed, and it's truly exhaustive.

At the time, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg - whose own account was compromised - said attackers would have had the ability to view private messages or post on someone's account, but there's no sign that they did.

Facebook plans to notify members over the next few days as to what information may have been taken, and alert them to be on the lookout for suspicious emails, text messages, or calls. In additional good news, the company said hackers weren't able to access more sensitive information like your password or financial information.

Rosen said they found no reason yet to believe hackers were in interested in people's information, rather that it appeared the mission was to harvest access tokens from friends associated with breached accounts.

Regulators around the world have launched inquiries into another matter: How profile details from 87 million Facebook users were improperly accessed by political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

The company does note that it is not ruling out "small-scale attacks", either, and is investigating.