Over the weekend, the personal data from a 2019 Facebook data breach was published. The information included phone numbers, Facebook IDs, names, locations, birthdates, and email addresses.
The details were posted on Saturday, says a report by Business Insider, and are also available in 106 different country-based packages, included 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India.
In a statement, Facebook said the data was from a data breach that occurred in 2019 and that the security hole that allowed it to take place had since been closed.
“This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
If you’re wondering if your data was included in the breach, you can quickly check if you’ve been included in the Facebook data breach, as well as a number of other data breaches. Here’s How.
How to Find Out if Your Personal Data Was Leaked from Facebook?
TNW reports that haveibeenpwned.com now has a copy of the data, allowing you to check whether your data was exposed.
- Go to the haveibeenpwned.com website on your phone or desktop browser.
- Enter your email address.
- The website will then list any data breaches that your email was included in.
- If your email was compromised, you’ll get a warning to change the password and enable two-factor authentication.
- Listed on the page will be all of the breaches that included information tied to the email address you entered.
Currently, users can only search for their email addresses. However, TNW says it’s possible the database will be expanded to allow phone number searches too.
To better protect your accounts from the damages of a data breach like this MacTrast strongly urges you to use a password manager to generate and store secure and unique passwords for all of the sites and services that you use. Also, activate two-factor authentication on any website or service that it is available for.
