By this time, you’ve probably heard of the huge Facebook hack, in which 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries leaked personal data online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birth dates – you name it.
Your first question will of course be to find out if you are part of the offense. There are a few places out there where you can find out if your data has been compromised.
One well-known website that tracks data breaches is Have I Been Pwned. Just follow the link to the website and enter your email address. You will not only notice if you were part of the Facebook violation, but also any other violations in which your data was compromised.
While writing this, you could only search with your email address, Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, considered searching for a phone number as well:
Need to search the FB phone numbers in @haveibeenpwned? I think about the pros and cons in terms of the value it adds to people affected, versus the risk it presents when used to solve numbers by identities (you will still need the source data to get it to do).
– Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) 4 April 2021
If you want to check your phone number in the leaked Facebook database, Gizmodo suggested a tool created by a website called The News Every Day, in which you enter your phone number to find out if it’s part of the violation. However, the site is not that well known, so you may want to stay at the more trusted site above, until more is known about it.
And if you notice that your data is compromised? Some of the steps you can take are to change the passwords of sites that are being compromised, use a password manager so that you can create and track unique passwords for each site (so that if compromised, it does not affect anyone else) ), uses two-factor authentication for additional security, and stays alert for news of any other violations.