In a massive data breach, the personal information of more than 533 million Facebook users was disclosed online, including contact number, Facebook IDs, dates of birth and other users. According to the Business Insider report, personal information of over 3.2 crore in the US, 1.1 crore in the UK and 60 lakh in India has been exposed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz were among the affected users.
Security expert Alon Gal first reported the Facebook data breach on Twitter. He said: “The 533,000,000 Facebook records have been disclosed for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is highly likely that the phone number used for the account has been leaked. I have yet to see Facebook recognize this absolute neglect of your data ”.
Gal, who is the technical director of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, said phone number, Facebook ID, full name, location, past location, date of birth, (sometimes ) the e-mail address, the date of creation of the account, the state of the relationship, the biographies of the users have been exposed. in the data breach.
He also warned users that cybercriminals would use the information for social engineering, scam, hacking, and marketing purposes. However, these are ways by which you can check if your phone number has been exposed during the data breach. There are a few sites where you can check whether your account details have been disclosed online or not.
One of the popular websites where you can check if your data has been disclosed or not is – Have I Been Pwned or https://haveibeenpwned.com/. Go to the website and enter the email address you use to sign in to Facebook. The website will not only show if you violated the Facebook leak, but also let you know whether or not you participated in other violations. As of now, you can only 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.
However, there is a separate website where you can check whether or not your number was involved in the breach. Gizmodo suggested a new site called The News Every Day or newseachday.com. To check if you’ve been involved in a violation, you can simply enter your phone number in the search box.