Facebook is reportedly making it difficult for users to find out if they were victims of the recent massive data breach on the platform, but a third party has provided a way for customers to find out.
Over the weekend, cybersecurity experts revealed over 533 million Facebook users personal information had been breached. The leaked data included full names, birthdays, phone numbers and users locations.
Facebook’s excuse was that the leak was due to a problem from way back 2019, which has since been fixed, yet the leakage in 2021 can not be remedied.
The leak affected some 30 million plus users in the US. This means over 500 million of the victims are around the world, including Africa and possibly Ghana.
But Facebook is intentionally not making it easy for users to find out if their data was included in the breach.
So third-party Cybersecurity experts have opened a website dubbed haveibeenpwned.com, which makes it simple for Facebook users to check by inputting the email address they used in registering the Facebook account.
“For now, it just checks if your email was among those stolen,” the experts said.
But according to them, out of the 533 million Facebook accounts that were included in the breach, only 2.5 million of them included emails in the stolen data, so only those ones have a chance of getting help on that website.
Meanwhile, the creator of the website, Troy Hunt says he is still considering whether to add phone numbers to be able to assist more people.
“The primary value of the data is the association of phone numbers to identities; whilst each record included phone, only 2.5 million contained an email address,” Hunt’s website said.
Although this data is from 2019, it could still be of value to hackers and cyber criminals like those who engage in identify theft.
Meanwhile, Facebook has reportedly remained silent over whether they will create a way for users to find out if their information was leaked.
Moreover, it has emerged that even Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was a victim of the massive leak, and through that experts discovered he has been using WhatsApp arch rival, Signal, which is much more secure than WhatsApp and Facebook.
This leakage comes at a time when Facebook is facing a massive backlash for imposing a policy that compels users to give up their privacy on Facebook and WhatsApp so the company can benefit from it.
