Facebook

How damaging is a data breach? Especially, for a social media platform like Facebook where millions of users share their personal information and post everyday routine as a hobby? Yes, more than damaging, we should call it a threat. Facebook has been in bad light with its loose privacy policies and constant data thefts. The company has a long history of failing to protect customer data. But for the past week, Facebook seems to constantly be on news for its biggest-ever data breach.

533 million Facebook users’ data go public

‘We can hide the fire, but not the smoke’ a well-said statement that suits Facebook’s scenario now. There were speculations ever since January about a massive data breach in the platform. Alan Gal, CTO of cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock first reported the data leak the same month after he saw a user advertising a Telegram bot that provides personal information of users for a price. Later, the situation deteriorated even further when a user in a low-level hacking forum published the phone numbers and personal data of over 533 million Facebook users for free online. The exposed information includes email ids, full names, locations, birthdates, etc of the platform's users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US 11 million in the UK, and 6 million in India. 

Now, you might wonder if you are one of the victims of this data breach. Maybe or maybe not. But there are some simple ways to find it. ‘Have I Been Pwned’ is a well-known site that tracks data breaches? So you can use this platform to verify if your data is public now. You can directly enter the email id that you use for your Facebook account to see if your account is compromised. If the result is yes, then it is a good idea to quickly change the password and other security details. If no, then you are safe so far. Meanwhile, ‘The News Each Day’ is another tool for checking your phone number against the leaked Facebook database. Here, you enter your phone number to check if the privacy of your account is breached. Besides, you can also use other reliable sites like ‘Have I Been Facebooked?’ ‘Facebook Checker,’ and ‘The raw data dump.’

Other famous data breaches in Facebook’s history

Cambridge Analytica data breach: Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump in his election team in 2016 harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters. Using the information, the company built a powerful software program that predicts and influences the choice of the ballot box. The firm was also behind the pro-Brexit Leave EU campaign. During that time, Cambridge Analytica stole the personal information of up to 87 million people resulting in a greater Facebook data privacy scandal. 

Unsecured Facebook databases lead: In 2019, Facebook confirmed that millions of unencrypted Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text online. At that time, the passwords of over 419 million unencrypted users, along with their phone numbers were stolen.