User’s of Facebook have had the contact information exposed after a major data breach occurred. For two weeks, Facebook left the user’s information unsecured on the web, leading to a massive data breach that security researchers believe has affected nearly 267 million Facebook users.
Bob Diachenko, along with Comparitech, worked together to uncover the leaked database. Upon its discovery on a hacker forum, Diachenko informed the Internet Service Provider (ISP) managing the IP address of the server. However, user information such as phone numbers and names were left online, at the latest, until December 19th of this year. From what was found on the database, most of the users are from the United States, and it is believed that the information will be used for a mass phishing campaign vis SMS.
Staying Safe
If you receive an unsolicited text message, the best course of action is to not respond, even if the sender knows some information about you. If you want to minimize the risk of your information being exposed to the public, Facebook does allow users to opt-out via privacy settings.
After logging into Facebook:
- Navigate to Settings
- Select Privacy
- Set all fields to “Only Me” or “Friends”
- Set “Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile” to “No”
While this will not protect against data breaches, but it will add some extra protection to your Facebook account, making it more difficult for criminals to gain access to your personal information. Although, the only way to be completely sure you are unaffected by Facebook data breaches is to completely delete your Facebook account.
If you have any questions on concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us! We are experts in cybersecurity and understand how important it is to make sure that all personal and business-related information is secure. To learn more about what Hammett Technologies can do to support your business, visit the What We Do page!
