Half a billion Facebook users information has been found visible online including the 899,629 Filipino users.
Social media giant Facebook was involved in a data dump from 2019, which has since been fixed. Over 30 million users in the United States have been affected yet Facebook isn’t making it easy to find out if someone was included in the breach.
The hackers are allowed to download the users’ ID, full name, location, birthdates, relationship status, bio, and phone numbers, even email address for 8 Euro or Php 460 only to get 30 credits, enough to access the details of more than 533 million social media users or 20% of its subscriber from 106 countries.
Now that the entire data has been posted on the hacking forum, anyone who has rudimentary skills could access it for free.
All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free.
This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked.
I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
Full list of affected users by country pic.twitter.com/Wrrzd0WyxE
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) January 14, 2021
So, here’s how to check if your account was one of the Facebook data breaches.
Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director and the creator of HaveIBeenPwned (HIBP), created the third-party website for anyone can freely check their account if it has been compromised or “pwned” in a data breach.
HIBP creator said that the data could make targeted attacks more potent if a person’s name and the country are known as their phone number is easily searchable.
And if your account has seen pwned, the user will follow two steps from HIBP:
Step 1: Go to www.haveibeenpwed.com
Step 2: Type in your email address or phone number (international format)
From this, the website will tell you how many data breaches they’ve found.