Forgot your password? Well, Facebook wants to help you recover your internet account.
The company is releasing an open source protocol that will let third-party sites recover user accounts through Facebook.
Typically, when people forget their password to a site, they’re forced to answer a security question or send a password reset request to their email. But these methods of account recovery can be vulnerable to hacking, said Facebook security engineer Brad Hill.
He recalled a time when he was granted permission to break into an online bank account. To do so, he took advantage of the password reset questions.
“It asked me what my favorite color was, and it let me guess as many times as I wanted,” he said Monday, during a presentation at the USENIX Enigma 2017 security conference.
Most other account recovery methods rely on sending a message to a user’s email address. But many people fail to properly secure their email accounts with strong passwords or two-factor authentication — and if there’s ever a breach, a hacker can reset passwords to the user’s other third-party accounts, Hill said.
