To find you whether you were ensnared in the Facebook data leak, don’t rely on the social network. Instead, you’ll have to use a third-party website, which can also be problematic.
A massive Facebook data breach has leaked phone numbers, full names, locations, email address and other biographical information of 533 million users.
The data breach covers 106 countries, and India is one of them.
Out of the 533 million users, over 6 million are Indian users. It was posted for free in a low-level hacking forum, leaving affected users exposed to identity theft, frauds and more.
The leaked data has now been added to the database of Have I Been Pwned?, a website dedicated to helping users find out if their personal data has been compromised by data breaches and hacks.
If you want to find out if your phone number is also included in the Facebook data breach, you can do it by following these simple steps:
- Open the Have I Been Pwned? website
- Enter your phone number in international format. This means that if your phone number is 9876512345, then you will have to enter it like this – +919876512345.
If your phone number is a part of the data breach, the results will confirm it.
Is it safe to enter my phone number in Have I Been Pwned?
Have I Been Pwned? service is well-known and is used by password managers like 1Password to verify if a user’s credentials like email address or password have been found in a data breach.
The service collates information leaked in data breaches and allows users to search if their email address, password or phone number has been leaked in those breaches.
The service’s privacy policy outlines how it handles user data.
You can also opt out of giving your email address to make sure it does not become publicly searchable.
Was My Phone Number Leaked?
In the event that you’d prefer to see if your information is in the break, without downloading the 20GB data set, you can attempt two different ways. The first includes going to Haveibeenpwned.com, a confided in site that tracks information breaks. It got a duplicate of the Facebook information base. Just enter your email address, and the site will advise you if the location was in the data set, a pointer your Facebook account was focused on.
The downside with Haveibeenpwned.com is that how the 20GB data set just contains 2,529,621 novel email addresses. That is about 0.5% for all the client records in the document, as indicated by Troy Hunt, who runs Haveibeenpwned.com. All things considered, the information base fundamentally records clients through telephone numbers, which you can’t include on Hunt’s site.
Accordingly, Hunt added the capacity for clients to type in their telephone number to check whether they were influenced.
Meanwhile, a client named David Johnstone in Australia additionally made a site, where you can type in your telephone number to decide if your data is contained in the spilled data set. (US clients can click here.)
The solitary issue is that Johnstone’s site, a news aggregator called TheNewsEachDay.com, was just begun a month prior, so it’s actually attempting to develop trust. “I knew there was interest in an instrument that could check if one’s telephone number was in the information so I chose to make it myself since it was simple and I didn’t have whatever else to do on the most recent day of this long end of the week,” he advised us in an email.
Nonetheless, composing in your telephone number into an arbitrary site isn’t actually the best thought by the same token. Consider the possibility that a similar site is logging your data. Accordingly, Johnstone says his site isn’t subtly recording anybody’s telephone numbers. (He, when all is said and done, maintains a business called Cycling Analytics, a web application for cyclists to investigate their riding.)
“I’m not saving the number or anything like that (yet that is the thing that an individual who is saving the numbers would say),” he advised us. ” I don’t know how much use there is to gather a great many telephone numbers while making this device requires approaching great many telephone numbers with names and other individual data, yet it’s hard or difficult to demonstrate my code isn’t doing anything loathsome.”
Another site called HaveIBeenFacebooked.com has additionally sprung up, which permits you to enter your telephone number to check whether your record was influenced. Be that as it may, once more, you’ll have to the trust site isn’t covertly logging your telephone number.
In the event that your own data was entrapped, be careful. By learning your telephone number and name, a cybercriminal could think of approaches to attempt to trick you.