Catalin Cimpanu reports:
An unusual traffic spike is what alerted Facebook engineers that something might be wrong, and it was an investigation into this heightened activity that led engineers to discover a massive security breach this week.
Facebook confirmed the hack earlier today, in a press release. It said hackers stole access tokens for roughly 50 million users.
Access tokens are alpha-numeric codes that are generated when a user logs in, and are saved in the user’s browser and Facebook’s servers at the same time. They are used to let users access the Facebook site without prompting the user to log in on every visit –with Facebook servers checking the browser’s access token in a page’s background.
Read more on ZDNet.
And as reported earlier by The Recorder, Facebook has already been hit with a class action lawsuit over the breach.