30 Million Facebook Accounts Were Hacked: Check If You’re One of Them

At the time of the initial disclosure, Facebook estimated that
the number of users affected by the breach could have been around
50 million, though a new update published today by the social media
giant downgraded this number to 30 million.

Out of those 30 million accounts, hackers successfully accessed
personal information from 29 million Facebook users, though the
company assured that the miscreants apparently didn’t manage to
access any third-party app
data^[2].

Here’s How Facebook Classified the Stolen Data:

• For about 15 million Facebook users, attackers accessed two
  sets of information: usernames and contact information including
  phone numbers, email addresses and other contact information
  depending on what users had on their profiles.
• For about 14 million Facebook users, attackers accessed an even
  wider part of their personal data, including the same two sets of
  information mentioned above, along with other details users had on
  their profiles, like gender, language, relationship status,
  religion, hometown, current city, birthdate, device types used to
  access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked
  into or were tagged in, website, people or pages they follow, and
  the 15 most recent searches.
• A remaining 1 million Facebook users did not have any personal
  data accessed by the attackers.

Besides this, Rosen also added that the attackers had no
information to data from “Messenger, Messenger Kids, Instagram,
WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Pages, payments, third-party apps, or
advertising or developer accounts.”
Moreover, hackers also were not able to access any private message
content, with one notable exception—If a user is a Facebook page
administrator who had received or exchanged messages from someone
on Facebook, the content of those messages was exposed to the
attackers.

Here’s How to Check If You Are One of 30 Million Affected
Users

Facebook said users can check whether they were affected by the
breach by visiting the social network’s Help
Center^[4].

Facebook also added that the company will directly inform those
30 million users affected to explain what information the attackers
might have accessed, along with steps they can take to help protect
themselves from any suspicious emails, text messages, or calls.

So far the identity of the hackers remains unclear, but Rosen
said Facebook is working with the FBI, the US Federal Trade
Commission, Irish Data Protection Commission, and other authorities
to investigate who might be behind the breach or if they were
targeting anyone in particular.