Have a Facebook account? Hackers likely have your personal data

Facebook Hack: Hackers have 533 million personal data of account users. Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Have a Facebook account? Hackers likely have your personal ID

Hackers have 533 million Facebook users’ personal data – Full name, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, marriage details, birthdates, biographies, relationship information, and email addresses. Are you among them?

A hacker recently posted online the leaked personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free in a low-level hacking forum. These were personal data scraped from Facebook between June 2017 and April 2018, according to the Search Engine Journal (SEJ). Are you among 533 million Facebook users whom hackers have their personal data? Find out!

The unprotected data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million users’ accounts in the US, 11 million in the UK, and 6 million in India. Below is the Facebook number of hacked Facebook personal data across the top seven most affected countries in Europe.

Image credit: Politico

This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely your personal data including full name, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, marriage details, birthdates, biographies, relationship information email addresses, and other account creation details were leaked.

The fact that personal details such as email addresses, full names, phone numbers, and locations do not change regularly makes the situation worrisome, so the valuable information provided by this latest leak accessible to the cybercriminals could be used fraudulently.

The belief that the hacked users may not have had all of these data points stolen might not douse the tension with many account holders and it’s currently difficult to ascertain precisely what personal information and the source the data was scraped.

it’s fair enough, therefore, to presume that a lot of the leaked personal information will be relevant, leaving users susceptible to phishing attacks and smishing as whereby hackers or cybercriminals try to hack their victims by making them click on a link or answer a text message.

How to know if your personal data was leaked

You can discover if your email address or phone number was leaked using Troy Hunt’s tool called Have I Been Pwned? According to Search Engine Journal, creator of the tool and Regional Director and MVP of Microsoft has stated that the tool can be used to discover whether you are a victim of the leak:

Other Eduonwheels’ Information Technology Education posts that might interest you:

How our world’s internet network will end soon

3 best ways to avoid future global escalation of Facebook-Australia face-off

New Social Media Rule: Tracing ‘First Originator’ of posts forthcoming

Top 24 Facebook account settings & searches you like to do

Facebook Marketplace in 80 cities near you: Buy, Sell, and Trade

The post verified several accounts which matched known Facebook users’ phone numbers with the IDs listed in a sample of the leaked data set.

The report has it that the email addresses that form part of the data set in Facebook’s password reset feature, can be used to partially expose a user’s phone number.

Alon Gal, the Chief Technology Officer, CTO of a cybercrime intelligence firm, Hudson Rock, was the first to discover the whole trough of online leaked data. Now, abounds the entire dataset widely on the hacking forum for free, leaving the skilled hackers the opportunity to use others’ personal accounts unrestricted at will.

This blog content on ‘Have a Facebook account? Are you among the 533 million users hackers have their personal data?’  is categorized under Information and Communication Technology Education News.

Our Information Technology Education System is about creating and delivering impacting, and empowering problem-solving information technology and enhancing effective communication skills to our amiable readers for better livelihood – Eduonwheels.