Facebook Data Breach: API Security Risks

In the year 2018 Facebook disclosed a massive data breach due to which the company had to face a lawsuit along with allegations of not properly securing its user data. The breach directly affected the authentication tokens of nearly 30 million of its users which led to the filing of several class-action complaints in a San Francisco appeals court. In the wake of the incident, Facebook pledged to strengthen its security. A feature, known as "View As" which was employed by developers to render user pages was exploited by hackers to get access to user tokens. The theft of these tokens is associated with the advancement of a major API security risk, it also indicates how API risks can go unnoticed for such a long time frame.