Beware of Facebook messenger being hacked: Hackers send money plea to user's friendsOct 7 (AZINS) Facebook users in India on Thursday reported hacking of their FB messengers. The users said that FB messenger on Thursday was accessed without their knowledge and was used to seek money from people in their friend lists. Some Facebook users also reported that they got notifications on their WhatsApp accounts from Facebook requesting a change of their password.   Lately, over 50 million Facebook accounts were hacked globally. The security issue was then taken up by the authorities and attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted “view As” a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts. Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.

According to sources in the IT ministry, they were aware of some hacking incidents and "would be investigating "the matter. "This is a serious issue, and we will seek explanations from the company."

Facebook was added as a contact on the users' WhatsApp friend list, upon which they "received a notification which sent a ‘password reset code’ and a link to change login details." Anyone who actually went ahead and reset their password basically handed over their password to the hackers who were running this scam.

“This is very serious matter, and needs to be looked at immediately," said resetraunter Zorawar Kalra, who has over 10,000 people following him on his personal Facebook account and over 2.5 lakh followers on his verified page. Kalra, who spoke to The Times of India, is one of the people who reported about the hacking incident on Thursday. Most of the people in his friends are his employees in his friend list. Kalra says he was shocked to when people actually started calling him to confirm about the money demand request sent through his account. “I have asked my marketing team to immediately write to Facebook and sort things out."

Facebook is already facing a CBI probe in the massive data leak scandal from its vendor Cambridge Analytica. The social media giant is also facing another inquiry related to the recent data breach of over 50 million users across the globe.  

“The data of Indian users appears to have been compromised. “The data of Indian users appears to have been compromised.  In fact, we fear that the rot may run a lot deeper,” a source in the ministry said.