The Facebook data leak of 2021 has been one of the biggest of its kind, with data belonging to a staggering 533 million users being listed online across hacking forums. Now, noted cyber security researcher Troy Hunt, who has been hailed for his work with Have I Been Pwned, has updated the database of his website with entries of the Facebook data leak, making all the phone numbers and email addresses involved with the data breach available for search to the public – in an easily accessible format. This can help multiple users find out whether their own private details have been a part of the new Facebook leak – an incident that’s now regarded as one of the biggest of its kind until date.
How to check if your phone or email was breached
To check if your phone number or email address were also part of over 60 lakh entries of Indian phone numbers or email addresses that were included in the 53.3 crore phone numbers and emails in the Facebook data leak, you can simply head 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, 91 (and no plus sign ahead of the number.
Explaining the update to his database of breached email addresses, passwords and phone numbers, Hunt stated that this does not conclusively signify the inclusion of all the data that was involved in the Facebook data leak. “I was sent data a couple of weeks before the headlines went nuts with reports of ‘533M Facebook Accounts’. The data I was sent had 370M records and I later obtained the larger corpus which is now in very broad circulation. A lot of it is the same, but a lot of it is also different. There is not one clear source of this data and people will argue about numbers, formats and all sorts of other things,” he says.
Have I Been Pwned has been well regarded in the consumer and cyber security community, and 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, so it is generally a good idea for you to track whether any of your particulars have surfaced in a recent cyber security snafu. Alongside showing whether your details match with any in the database, Have I Been Pwned also shows users exactly which data breaches may have leaked their information, hence adding more context to the data as well.
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