After MobiKwik data breach, social media giant Facebook suffered a data breach in which data of 500 million users was compromised. Today we will tell you how to check if your info was hacked and other additional information about the breach. This data-breach has left the data of 533 million Facebook users compromised. These users come from more than 100 countries and their data included names, gender, marital status, place of occupation, birthdates, etc.

The data breach was first by Hudson Rock’s co-founder and CTO Alon Gal. Mr. Gal alleged that data of over 500 million people are leaked for free. Mr. Gal took to Twitter and wrote, “All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked. I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data.”

According to another tweet posted by Mr. Gal, a total of 61,62,450 users’ data is compromised. It should be noted that the database was first uncovered in 2019 where it was sold on an IM platform called Telegram. People paid $20 per search to get crucial information about a certain Facebook user. According to an online platform called Motherboard, one could just pay $20 dollars to a Telegram bot through which they could get access to the data they wanted.

The difference between then and now is, a person would not need to pay anything to anyone to get their hands on the data as the database is being seen at multiple forums.

Meanwhile, Facebook in an attempt to be assertive and take charge of situation, admitted to the breach. A spokesperson from the social media giant said, “This is old data that was previously reported in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”

Like any social-media platform, Facebook too has its share of privacy and security issues since its inception. Back in 2019, a data-breach was discovered by a security researcher which left 267 million Facebook users’ accounts vulnerables. This included their phone numbers, their names and their IDs. The same year, another security flaw was discovered which involved the data of 540 million users, including the meta data like their comments and likes, all on a public database on the Amazon’s cloud. Later the same year, tech journalism website called TechCrunch reported that the data of 419 million Facebook users from US and UK was available on public databases.

In 2018, another hack was reported by Facebook itself which saw data of over 29 million users compromised. After the aftermath of the hack, Facebook released a report in which it shared just how and what the hackers did. According to Facebook, the hackers made use of the company’s “View As” code. The feature lets people see what their profile might look to people other than their friends. Leveraging the feature of Facebook against Facebook, hackers obtained posts, friend lists and names of Messenger conversations from 4,00,000 people. After that data was obtained, they attacked further 30 million people using the data that they obtained. Another 15 million people were attacked, and hackers were able to access their names and contact details including their phone numbers.

Hackers were able to obtain timeline posts, friend lists, groups, and the names of recent Messenger conversations from an initial 400,000 people After stealing data from the 400,000 people attacked first, Facebook used their friends list to steal access tokens for approximately 30 million people.

How to check if your data was hacked in Facebook breach:

The leaked database has been added to ‘Have I been Pwned’, an excellent resource that indexes all the data that is exposed after a breach. To check whether your email address was leaked in the recent breach, or any breach that occurred, enter your email address in the search field and click on ‘Pwned’ button. Once the button is clicked, you will see a list of all the breaches that the email ID was involved in.