Now, you’ve probably heard of Facebook’s massive data breach, in which more than 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries have leaked personal data online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birth dates – you name it.
Your first question will, of course, be how to check if you are part of this breach. There are a few places where you can find out if your data has been compromised.
A well-known website that tracks data breaches is Have I Been Pwned. Just follow the website link and enter your email address. You will find out not only if you participated in the Facebook breach, but also in any other breaches in which your data may have been compromised.
While, at the time of this writing, you could only do a search using your email address, Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, was considering the possibility of including a phone number search as well:
FB phone numbers must be searchable at @Im sorry? I am thinking of the pros and cons in terms of the value it adds to the people affected in relation to the risk presented if it is used to help resolve numbers for identities (you would still need the source data to do this).
– Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) April 4, 2021
If you want to verify 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 is part of the breach. However, this site is not as well known, so until you know more about it, you may want to keep the most reliable site listed above.
What if you discover that your data has been compromised? Some of the steps you can take are to change passwords for compromised sites, use a password manager so that you can create and track unique passwords for each site (so that if one is compromised, it will not affect the others), use authentication of two factors for added security and stay alert for news of any other violations.