Oliver Haslam·

How To Check If Your Facebook Data Was Compromised In Recent Hack

Facebook has today provided more information on the hack that took place last month, detailing what kinds of information was taken and who was affected. The data that went missing includes things like a user’s name, their location, contact information, and religion as well as others, although the same information was not taken for all 29 million impacted accounts.

According to Facebook, of those 29 million, 15 million had their name, email address, and phone number exposed to the hackers, while the remaining 14 million also had information like their gender, religion, device information, location, and information on Pages liked stolen. The company is letting those who are impacted by the incident know via a new webpage that has been set up at facebook.com/help/securitynotice. All users need to do is visit it while logged in, in order to check whether they were impacted. At the bottom of the page, users will be told if they were and if so, what information the company believes was accessed.

The good news is that if you were impacted, you don’t need to do anything. Passwords were not compromised, which means password resets are not needed. Tokens were stolen, giving the hackers access to accounts, but Facebook reset those when the hack was discovered last month.

At the moment, it doesn’t look like anything has actually been done with the data that was stolen, although that could obviously change at any time. We don’t know why the hack was carried out, either, but an investigation is underway with both Facebook and the FBI involved.

For now, the only thing concerned users can really do is ditch Facebook for good, although that doesn’t appear to be likely for most people, given how ubiquitous the social network has become, and not just when it comes to personal use.

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