By Shelly Melancon (Switzerland)
You can be safety conscious and very diligent about safeguarding yourself, yet fall prey to cyber crimes by inadequate security measures put in place by other organizations you rely on.
Such is the case of about half a billion Facebook users who are victims of the social media database leak.
News has it that on Saturday, a hacker posted the details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users on social media, offering it for sale to interested buyers. The leak contains bios, IDs, phone numbers, email addresses, locations and other basic data of the concerned individuals.
The victims are 533 million in number from 106 countries. There are about 32 million USA citizens, 11 million from UK and 6million from India.
Source of the Facebook Users’ Database Breach.
This is not the first time such evil had befallen the social media giant. In the 2016 US election, Cambridge Analytica was found guilty of obtaining about an 80million Facebook users number for political ads purpose. Consequently, a fine of $691,500 million was paid by Facebook.
Facebook told the public that the leak was outdated and as a result of a private error that was discovered in 2019 which has been resolved then.
However, Cyber Technology officer, Alon Gal advised social media users to be security conscious, guiding their social media accounts diligently. He continued saying the platform’s management cannot be entirely blamed for the incident as such giant social media platforms are always the targets of cybercriminals.
Dangers Victims of Facebook Leak are vulnerable to
In this fast digitalizing age, phone numbers is a very crucial tool that is connected to virtually every digital registration we do. With just your phone digits, cyber intruders can gain access to your social media accounts, especially, your email.
This breach was verified as the released information was test run. The emails were checked, where the link to regain lost passwords was used, the partially displayed email registered numbers were found to match the numbers against the emails on the leaked list.
Consequently, security experts warned social media users to keep their accounts private and be on the watch.
How to know if your account is at risk and how to avoid falling victim
Tony Hunt runs an efficient and well-known platform (HaveIBeenPwned.com). On this site, you can easily check if your account is one of the 10 billion accounts that had been hacked before. You can also check if your social medial password is still secure.
However, if you discover any irregularities in any of your accounts, the next step is to change your password or phone number. You may as well use the two-way verification method to safeguard your accounts.
Remember, uploading your data online is a risk you would be solely responsible for.
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