Of Dwight Silverman
Over the weekend, it was reported that hackers had leaked to the Internet a database containing the personal data of 533 million Facebook users, including emails and physical addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and more. While the data was stolen in violation of 2019 and facebook had connected for a long time had covered this "hole" of the leak, this is the first time that this information was made available for free.
If you have a Facebook account or if you had an account in 2019 that you deactivated you should be concerned. And now you can find out if your personal information has been made public.
The site "Have I Been Pwned?" allows users to search databases from dozens of breaches including Facebook data. Go to the site home page and write down any addresses you use on Facebook to see if they are included. And yes, it is safe to do so. This site is trusted and its operator, Troy Hunt, is the regional director of Microsoft in Australia.
Hunt managed to find more than 2,5 million e-mail addresses in the database. This site also allows you to search to see if your password is among those that have been compromised. Because Facebook data also includes phone numbers, Hung is considering adding the ability to search for a phone number. But there are various issues with this. According to Hunt in the following tweet, one could keep the entire Facebook infringement database and match the names with the confirmed phone numbers.
Source: Capital.gr