Data of 5O mn Facebook users at risk after security breach, accounts from India likely hit

Data of 50 million Facebook users have been exposed following a massive security breach by unknown hackers, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, amid fears that a significant number of the accounts affected could be from India.

The precautionary measure taken by the social media giant has impacted another 40 million users, Zuckerberg said Friday.

In a conference call with reporters, he did not give a country-wise of the user accounts hit by the data breach.

However, a significant number of affected users are expected to be from India, given that the company has the maximum 270 million users in the country. It has 2 billion global users.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a PTI question on the number of accounts affected in India.

"On Tuesday afternoon, our engineering team found an attack affecting up to 50 million accounts on Facebook. The attackers exploited a vulnerability in the code of the View As feature which is a privacy feature that lets people see what their Facebook profile would look like to another person," Zuckerberg said.

"The vulnerability allowed the attackers to steal Facebook access tokens - which are the equivalent of a digital key - which the attackers could have used to take over or access people's accounts," he said.

Stressing that the investigation into the incident was still at a nascent stage, Zuckerberg said the social media giant does not know if any of the accounts were misused or who was behind the cyberattacks.

"So far, our initial investigation has not shown that these tokens were used to access any private messages or posts or to post anything to these accounts."