Personal information of over 533 million Facebook users was leaked online, are you one of them?
In a massive data breach, the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users was leaked online. The data included the contact number, Facebook IDs, birthdates, and more of users.
As per the Business Insider report, personal information of over 3.2 crore users in the US, 1.1 crores in the UK, and 60 lakh in India were exposed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz were among the affected users.
Security expert had reported the breach on Twitter and said:
“All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked. I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data”.
Gal, who is the CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock said that the Phone number, Facebook ID, Full name, Location, Past Location, Birthdate, (Sometimes) Email Address, Account Creation Date, Relationship Status, Bio of the users were exposed in the data leak.
Why do the cyber criminals need this information?
Gal, who is the CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock said that the Phone number, Facebook ID, Full name, Location, Past Location, Birthdate, (Sometimes) Email Address, Account Creation Date, Relationship Status, Bio of the users were exposed in the data leak.
He also cautioned users that the cybercriminals will use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking, and marketing. However, they are ways through which you can check whether your phone number has been exposed in the data breach. There are a couple of sites where you can check whether your account details have been leaked online or not.
Where can you check if your information was leaked?
One of the popular websites where you can check whether your data has been leaked or not is—Have I Been Pwned or https://haveibeenpwned.com/.
Go to the website and type the email address that you use to log in to Facebook. The website will not only display whether you have breached in the Facebook leak but also tell you whether you have been a part of any other breaches or not. As of now, you could only do a search using your email address but the creator of Have I been Pawned, Troy Hunt now plans to include a phone number search as well.
Currently the best advice we can offer is that you should change your password and set your account to be completely private and