A team working to create a privacy app discovered a detrimental glitch in Facebook security that can lock users out of their own settings on the site's app.
The bug, which Facebook has been intently working to fix, makes millions of users vulnerable to identity theft by making it impossible for them to revoke an app's access to their personal information, Yahoo News reported.
As MyPermissions chief executive officer and cofounder Olivier Amar and his team discovered, the glitch doesn't let users remove downloaded apps from a device.
"We really didn't believe it at first," Amar told Yahoo News in a phone interview. "Any application that uses Facebook to connect can be shut down."
Hackers can infiltrate your personal data and make it almost impossible for you to disable the app.
"Think about it like this: You download an app that promises to do one thing, but actually comes from a hacker who wants to seriously invade your privacy by mining your data," MyPermissions said in a blog post. "Given the right coding, this developer could trigger the same effect, basically making it impossible for a user to disconnect this malware app and revoke its permission to access your personal information."
Since about half of Facebook's users access the social network only through their smartphones, a large group of people is at risk of hackers pulling their contacts, phone numbers and more.
Hackers who used the fairly simple code could block users from getting into their own accounts, buying several hours for the hacker to get into contact lists, emails and other personal data.
"We have a former hacker that works for us," Amar said. "He told us that this is something he absolutely would have used and that the code could be replicated in less than hour."
Facebook engineers told Amara that the issue should be fixed by Friday, VentureBeat reported.
"The first thing we did, we went straight to Facebook," Amar said, as quoted by Yahoo News. "They did a fantastic job of getting in touch with us very quickly. Facebook takes this very seriously, and I'm very impressed by them."
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