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Since Saturday, a massive trove of Facebook data has circulated publicly, splashing information from roughly 533 million Facebook users across the internet. The data includes things like profile names, Facebook ID numbers, email addresses, and phone numbers. It s all the kind of information that may already have been leaked or scraped from some other source, but it s yet another resource that links all that data together and ties it to each victim presenting tidy profiles to scammers, phishers, and spammers on a silver platter.
Facebook s initial response was simply that the data was previously reported on in 2019 and that the company patched the underlying vulnerability in August of that year. Old news. But a closer look at where, exactly, this data comes from produces a much murkier picture. In fact, the data, which first appeared on the criminal dark web in 2019, came from a breach that Facebook did not disclo
HOW TO TELL IF YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT HAS BEEN BREACHED! By Mlungisi Mpela
Besides an overflow of people, both parties have systems that can be easily breached.
This past weekend, cybersecurity experts revealed that about half a billion Facebook users’ personal information was breached.
A “treasure trove” of data including full names, birthdays, phone numbers and locations were breached by hackers.
Facebook said the massive leak, which stemmed from an issue in 2019, has since been fixed.
However, the weekend’s breach saw more than 30 million accounts in the USA being affected.
But Facebook isn’t making it easy to find out if your data was included in the breach.
Last weekend, a set of databases that contain personal data from 533 million
Facebook users was listed on a well-known data marketplace. First reported by Alon Gal, the Co-Founder and CTO of a cybersecurity company called Hudson Rock, around 11.6 million of those users were from Malaysia.
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If you are wondering whether your details are included in the leak or otherwise, you can now use the popular online tool Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) to verify it. In case you are not familiar with HIBP, it was launched in December 2013 and is the brainchild of Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt.
For Malaysians, they may remember that Troy has added the Jobstreet database into HIBP after the massive national-scale data breach of 2017. In the case of Facebook though, you can verify the involvement of your personal data by providing your phone number to HIBP’s search engine as each of the records within the leaked database contained a phone number.
Facebook breach: Australian privacy watchdog examines Facebook data dump afr.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from afr.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.