A massive Facebook data breach ended up leaking phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates, and users’ emails on the internet for free. You must be thinking about what to do now? Well, the first thing you should be doing right now is enabling two-factor authentication on your accounts. Before you enable 2FA, make sure you have saved the backup codes somewhere safe.
To check whether your account was also part of 533 million users’ data that got leaked earlier, you need to visit Have I Been Pawnd, a tool that lets you check if your email was part of any data breach. The website owner, Troy Hunt, who is also Microsoft Regional Director and MVP, hosted a poll on Twitter asking users if he should add support for phone numbers as well.
Even though most people were against this idea, the majority sided in favor of adding phone number support. The new updated version of the website now checks your phone number across the leaked database of users and lets you know if your account data has also been leaked in the huge data breach.
Visit the link mentioned above and enter your email address or phone number associated with your Facebook account. It will let you know if your account has also been among the leaked Facebook data of 533 million users, including Mark Zuckerberg. It was also revealed that Mark Zuckerberg’s phone number, found in the breach, is on Signal Messenger, suggesting that the co-founder of Facebook has been using Signal as well, possibly for privacy concerns or maybe for just testing purposes.
Simply delete your account and you won’t have to check it for breaks. I’ve done it a long ago and chosen Utopia p2p as an alternative. At least it never faced data breaks and provides real privacy to me and my colleagues/friends. It’s a cyber security era and we have to understand it and stop supporting big corporations that will continue losing and selling our data.