Facebook says there are hundreds of Apple and Android apps that are designed to steal personal information from social media accounts.

Facebook's parent company, Meta, says it has found over 400 such apps, and has alerted Apple and Google to encourage them to block them from being downloaded.

The apps, including photo editors and games, lure users in before asking for their social media login details.

“The applications would disguise themselves on app stores as things like photo editors, mobile games, health and lifestyle trackers,” says David Agranovich, Meta's director of threat disruption.

“The applications would promise features like the ability to turn a photo of yourself into a cartoon, but as soon as you download and open the app, it would prompt you to log in with Facebook.”

He says Meta will notify people it believes may have been at risk.

“We're being kind of deliberately overcautious and notifying about 1 million users across our entire platform that they may have been exposed to applications like this,” Mr Agranovich said.

“That doesn't mean that they were compromised, just that we think that they may have been exposed to one of these applications.

“There are many legitimate apps on the Google and Apple stores that offer the ability to log in with Facebook credentials in safe and secure ways.

“Cyber criminals know how popular these types of apps are, and they use similar themes to trick people and try to steal their accounts and information. 

“This is a common thing across scammers and spammers, we see it in a bunch of different parts of the internet from spam to fishing lures to similar activity. 

“We know that at times, it can be challenging for everyday internet users to differentiate between safe and malicious requests,” Mr Agranovich said.