The recent data leak from Facebook had been one of the worst in history and it affects almost half a billion of users. Out of the 530 million of users, 11 million of them were Malaysians, and you may have wonder, are you part of this data breach? Read through this and you’ll be able to find it out!
Have I Been Pwned?
“Have I Been Pwned” is developed by Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director and the website is being developed as a free resource for anyone to quickly assess if they were being put at risk due to an online account of theirs having been compromised or “pwned” in a data breach.
Users can simply input your email address and you’ll get the results of whether your information had been leaked out in all the previous data breaches.
For example, to check if the Facebook leak included your email address, you can visit Have I Been Pwned and enter your email address in the search field.
Once you’ve submitted your email, a list of data breaches the email was exposed to will be displayed.
According to “Have I Been Pwned”, the most common user identifiable field in the recent Facebook leak is phone numbers. Nonetheless, about 2.5 million out of the 533 million Facebook member have their email address exposed too.
Given that only 2.5 million email addresses were leaked, if the search for your email address on “Have I Been Pwned” does not return a matching result, you could still be part of the leak.
What can you do next?
Even though the results from “Have I Been Pwned” is negative, it is recommended that you change your existing Facebook password and enable a two-factor authentication.
If you are not familiar with it, the two-factor authentication is one of the security features to help protect your Facebook account. To enable two-factor authentication, simply follow the steps below:
- Go to the “Settings” of your Facebook account.
- Go to “Security and login“.
- Scroll to the bottom and in the “Two-factor authentication” section and click on “Edit“.
- Select the security method you want to add and follow the on-screen instructions.
Extra protection can never be a bad thing. Enable these security features and keep your account safe!
