How Facebook’s Security Breach Could Affect You & How To Check If You’ve Been Hacked
You may have heard by now that Facebook has confirmed the details of a massive security breach. In fact, over 30 million users had their personal information compromised, according to the Inquisitr. And that’s left many people wondering if they were one of the 30 million users. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to check. Just head to Facebook’s security update page, and scroll to the bottom. There’s a colored box that’s titled, “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?” If your account was not compromised, it will simply state that your account has not been impacted.
Unfortunately for those who were hacked, the message might reveal that their “name, email addresses, and phone number [were] accessed by hackers,” according to Wired. However, the fallout could also include the following.
“Username, date of birth, gender, devices you used Facebook on, and your language settings, at the very least. If you filled out the relationship status, religion, hometown, current city, work, education, or website sections of your profile, they got that too. And most unsettling of all, they could have accessed the 10 most recent locations you checked into or were tagged in, and the 15 most recent searches you’ve entered into the Facebook search bar.”
The problem is that many Facebook users have been using the platform assuming a level of security and privacy, which has been repeatedly questioned following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Steps to take if your Facebook was hacked:
1. Call your bank & mobile operator to add security like a pincode to prevent social engineering attacks
2. Watch out for spam / phishing attempts
3. Consider whether Fb still deserves to host your social media https://t.co/WOMPFCyDu2— Josh Constine ?? (@JoshConstine) October 12, 2018
And the fallout from the hacking could be long-lasting, according to a security expert named Oren Falkowitz, reported NBC News. The expert elaborated that “Tens of millions of people impacted by the Facebook data breach are likely to find that they have now become intertwined in systematic phishing campaigns that will persistently target them and the organizations they work for [sic] for a long time.”
If you’ve been impacted by the security breach, and are not familiar with phishing scams, now is as good a time as ever to read up on them. Phishing scams, usually conducted through email messages, try to trick people into clicking malicious links. Sometimes, these links can take people to pages that look similar to their bank’s login page, or other sensitive pages, thus tricking users into typing in their username and password. The information is then sent back to the hacker, who now has access to your personal pages.
Meanwhile, the FBI is reportedly investigating, and potential suspects’ names have been withheld for the time being.
