DNA Explainer: How to check you are among 533 million Facebook users whose data was leaked online

If you are a Facebook user then you may be at risk of your data been leaked online for free. This may mean your phone number, ID, photos, birthdates etc could have been seen by others without your permission.

Recently there has been a massive data breach by social networking service Facebook where the personal information of over 533 million users was leaked online. These range from contact numbers of the users to Facebook IDs, birthdates, friend lists, and much more.

Security expert Alon Gal first reported the data breach on Twitter saying, "All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked. I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data."

Alon Gal said that the Phone number, Facebook ID, Full name, Location, Past Location, Birthdate, (Sometimes) Email Address, Account Creation Date, Relationship Status, Bio of the users were exposed in the data leak.

He also cautioned users that the cybercriminals will use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking, and marketing. Gal is the CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock.

Who is affected

The personal information of over 533 million Facebook users was leaked online.

The data included the contact number, Facebook IDs, birthdates, and more of users.

Personal information of over 3.2 crore users in the US, 1.1 crores in the UK, and 60 lakh in India were exposed.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz were among the affected users.

Has your Facebook data been leaked?

Go to the 'Have I Been Pwned' website. Here, you can simply enter your phone number or email address to see if your data has been a part of any recent (or old) data breach.

Be sure to enter your phone number searches in the international format to get the correct results.

For instance, if you are searching for an Indian number, prefix the 10-digit mobile number with the country code, 9. Don't use plus sign ahead of the number.

The website is largely popular for finding out whether your data has also been part of a breach.

The site allows you to track breached email addresses, passwords and now even phone numbers.

'Have I Been Pwned' also shows users exactly which data breaches may have leaked their information.