Facebook Data Breach 2021: How to check if your personal data was hacked?
You’ve probably heard of Facebook’s data breach . A vulnerability that the company did not eliminate until 2019 allowed it to obtain the phone numbers of more than 533 million users with 32 million records on users in the US,11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India and now that data has been leaked according to business insider, approximately 20% of Facebook users appear in the leak, the percentage of exposed users is much higher The data includes phone numbers, full names, location, email address, and biographical information
It’s not the first time we’ve heard of a major data breach, but this database associates phone numbers with real identities of people around the world. Many of these records contain, in addition to the telephone number and full name of the user, their gender, marital status, place of residence and employer. Some also contain an email.
How to check if your mobile was hacked?
To see if yours is one of the more than 500 million leaked phones, open Have I Been Pwned? and write your number in the search engine using the international format, with the prefix of your country in front. For example, to find a number in United states, type +1 NXX-NXX-XXXX or 1NXX-NXX-XXXX (the + does not matter, but do not add zeros to the international prefix). If your phone is in the leaked database, you will see the message “Oh no – pwned!” and below, the April 2021 Facebook leak on ” Breaches you were pwned in.”
Keep in mind that the filtered data is from before 2019, so it could appear in the database even if you no longer have a Facebook account.
What to do if you appear in the leak?
First, make sure you use strong passwords for services where you can log in with your phone number, like Facebook or Instagram. Turn on 2-Step Verification and if you struggle to create unique passwords, start using a password manager like LastPass .
Second, beware of phone scams , as well as SMS scams , as scammers now have your personal data and messages can be more credible.
If you still feel exposed, you can always change your phone number. Facebook did not properly protect your personal data, and now there is no other way to erase that data from the internet.
