Over 500 Million Facebook Accounts Compromised
Security researchers have discovered that an attack in 2019 exposed the full names, dates of birth, email addresses, and phone numbers of 533 million Facebook users around the world. (Did we miss Facebook informing us of this breach?) The stolen information was compiled into a database and tied into a Telegram bot that enabled criminals to query the database for a fee. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
To find out if you’ve been compromised by this or any other big hack, plug your email address into Have I Been Pwned?. It will list any breaches you’ve been a victim of, along with recommendations on ways to protect yourself from future breaches, like using a password manager like 1Password to generate a strong, unique password for each account, enabling two-factor authentication, etc.
The News Each Day has created a more specific tool that lets you plug in your phone number to see if it’s in the Facebook breach.
Oh no! Another leak. Let’s see if my Facebook information was leaked:
Gawker… No.
Adobe… No.
Spambot… What? No, not Facebook.
Dropbox… No.
MongoDB… No.
Old BB I haven’t posted to in decades… No.
Nope, it looks like my email is safe! It wasn’t exposed by Facebook!
Have I Been Pwned? now lets you also search with your phone number to see if it’s in the Facebook breach (which apparently has far more phone numbers than email addresses).