How to know if you were a victim of Facebook’s big data breach

If you are a Facebook user, then you should be aware of the recent attack that cause the vulnerable Facebook system to leak out sensitive user data to a bunch of attackers. The attack left users’ location data, history and a lot more, bare into the hands of the attacker, and this information could be used for scams and more ahead.

If you are a user, you can check if you were a victim of the breach. Facebook released a statement which also mentions a link where users can use to find out if they were affected in the recent attack.

Here’s how you can find out if you were a victim and if your data was accessed.

Simply click on this link https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice?ref=sec

Scroll down towards the bottom till you find a pale blue patch which states, ‘Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?’

You will find a message in that box which will let you know if your account was impacted. If you are already logged into Facebook on that browser, in another tab, your message will appear immediately.

If not, you will be asked to log into Facebook in another tab and then refresh the page again. You should read a message that state, ‘Based on what we've learned so far, your Facebook account has not been impacted by this security incident. If we find more Facebook accounts were impacted, we will reset their access tokens and notify those accounts.’ This means you are safe.

On September 25, 2018, Facebook took a massive hit to an attack that left almost 29 million users vulnerable to their data being exposed to hackers. Facebook confirmed the attack and said that it took them around two days to find the issue and fix the vulnerability. However, the attackers, during that period, managed to feast on a big chunk of data, which amounted to around 29 million victims.

Cyber security experts warned that attackers could use stolen information in targeted phishing scams.

Facebook said it was continuing to investigate whether the attackers took actions beyond stealing data, such as posting from accounts, but had not found additional misuse.

The attackers cleverly used a tactic that used the ‘view as’ vulnerability by using a small amount of accounts they were in control of. These accounts were used to capture the data of the victims Facebook friends, and then they used a tool they developed to breach friends of friends and beyond that.

While Facebook managed to resolve the issue last month itself, they also asked around 90 million users to log back into their accounts as a precautionary method.