The previous week, it was revealed that approx 533 million Facebook Accounts have become victim of data hack, thereby losing personal data including Names, phone numbers, date of births, Email Addresses and more. Apart from the publicised data, the hack also stole private information.
The leak is dated from a breach which happened in 2019, reports The Record. The attacker finding vulnerability in Facebook’s contacts importer feature was automatically collecting data till August 2019 when Facebook detected the bug and deactivated the hacker’s access to their database. Of course this is a old breach, but surfacing in the Social Media platforms this week because the data is now being widely disseminated on cyber-crime forums.
But now question arises, how to check if you have become become prey to this cyber attack. The easiest way to do so is by visiting Have I Been Pawned ? The tool will let you know if your data has been leaked based on your Phone number and Email ID.
Also Read: How To Recognize Fake Facebook Profiles
Troy Haunt who has created this tool mentions this to be an extremely valuable tool though by using your phone number on the tool to perform a search might be open to certain privacy risks. Further Troy insists the users to first perform search with their mail IDs. If the search doesn’t produce a hit, then the users might consider using their phone numbers to check the status of their Facebook data vulnerability. The users must enter their phone number followed by their country code to perform search.
Now the most important fact, If your search discovers that your data is leaked then you must take precautions right away. Of course your passwords were not part of the attack, but your mail id and phone number must have been stolen and hence you may become victim of pishing, spam and harassment attacks. Besides, you must do two things, one is using a password manager if you are not doing already and the other is to create a unique pass-code to use for for two-factor authentication.
Source: XDA Developers