By <https://9to5mac.com/author/benlovejoy/> Ben Lovejoy at:
https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/05/personal-data-leaked-from-facebook/
It was revealed over the weekend that a huge data breach saw
personal data leaked from Facebook,
including phone numbers, full names, and dates of birth. There's now a way
for you to check if any of your personal data was compromised .
Although it has just made the news now, the breach occurred much earlier, as
tweeted back in January of this year by
security
firm
Hudson Rock.
block quote
In early 2020 a vulnerability that enabled seeing the phone number linked to
every Facebook account was exploited, creating a database containing the
information
533m users across all countries. It was severely under-reported and on
January 14th 2021, the database became much more worrisome.
A few days ago a user created a Telegram bot allowing users to query the
database for a low fee, enabling people to find the phone numbers linked to
a very
large portion of Facebook accounts. This obviously has a huge impact on
privacy.
block quote end
Facebook
confirmed the breach, but said that it actually took place in 2019, not
2020.
Business Insider
verified some of the records.
block quote
Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by
matching known Facebook users' phone numbers with the ID's listed in the
data
set. We also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set
in Facebook's password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal
a user's phone number.
block quote end
Was your personal data leaked from Facebook?
TNW
reports that
www.haveibeenpwned.com
now has a copy of the data, allowing you to check whether your data was
exposed.
. Head to
www.haveibeenpwned.com
on your phone or desktop.
. Enter your email ID.
. If your email was compromised, you'll get a warning to change the password
and enable two-factor authentication. You can also scroll down on the page
to see all the breaches that may have included your credentials tied to the
email address you entered.
Right now, you can only search for your email address, but TNW says it's
possible the database will be expanded to allow phone number searches too.
As always, we recommend protecting your
privacy
by using a password manager for all the sites and services you use, and
switching on two-factor authentication where supported. This blocks two of
the
most common forms of attack: dictionary attacks, where the hacker tries a
variety of commonly used passwords; and trying credentials from one breached
website on a bunch of others.
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