Earlier this week, a hacker leaked data of 533 million Facebook user online including 61 lakh Indian Users.
The leaked Facebook data includes both personal and private information which were not even made to public, such as phone numbers, birthdates, email addresses, and more.
As per reports of The Record, the leak is linked to a data breach of Facebook that took place in 2019.
The hacker reportedly marked vulnerability in Facebook’s contacts importer feature and collected data automatically still Facebook detected the breach and cut off the attacker’s access in August of 2019.
Though it has been years since the data leak happened last, but it grab the media attention the previous week after it was surfaced on cybercrime forums.
If you are worried and want to know if your information is in the leaked data then you can check so by visiting the Have I Been Pwned.
This website will let you know check if your data has been leaked based on your email address and your phone number.
Also Read: 61 Lakh Indians Among 53.3 Crore Facebook Users Whose Personal Data Was Leaked
According to Troy Hunt (creator of Have I Been Pwned), the Facebook users can perform search with their email or phone number. But using your phone number may come with some privacy risks. However, Troy mentions it as a valuable service.
Hunt said that there are over 500M phone numbers, but only a few million email addresses so >99% of people were getting a ‘miss’ when they should have gotten a ‘hit. “The phone numbers were easy to parse out from (mostly) well-formatted files. They were also all normalised (sp) into a nice consistent format with a country code. In short, this data set completely turned all my reasons for not doing this on its head,” Haunt adds.
Here’s how you can search using your phone number
If your email address doesn’t produce any result then you can enter your phone number along with your country calling code.
For example, in India the phone numbers start with +91; in Australia it’s 61; and the U.K. it’s 44.
Now post search, If you discover your data was leaked, then it’s obvious that you take precautions right away.
The data breach of Facebook did not include passwords but the phone numbers and personal information were. So chances are there that you might be a victim of spam messages, phishing, and harassment attempts.
In this case a Password manager can help you to create and manage your existing passwords, and also creating a unique passcodes to use two-factor authentication might help you to many extent.
Source: xda developers
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