Facebook Data Breach (2018)

Facebook believes that spammers, and not a nation-state, are responsible for a devastating recent hack that stole the personal information of 29 million Facebook users, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The report, which cites anonymous sources, says that Facebook has "tentatively" concluded the hackers were spammers who were posing as a digital marketing company. The hack, which Facebook first disclosed in September, is the largest breach suffered by the social network. The hackers were able to exploit vulnerabilities in Facebook's code to get their hands on "access tokens" — essentially digital keys that give them full access to compromised users' accounts — and then scraped users' data. Among the user data stolen by hackers were birthdates, phone numbers, search history and even recent locations the users had "checked in" at.