Although Facebook initially estimated that up to 50 million users may have been compromised in a data breach last month, the social network says that 30 million accounts were affected after an initial investigation. Facebook also set up a Help Center for users to find out if their account were impacted.
After revealing that a security vulnerability discovered in late September allowed hackers to gain access to an estimated 50 million accounts, Facebook’s current report suggests that the number of impacted users is closer to 30 million.
“We now know that fewer people were impacted than we originally thought,” Facebook said in a blog post . “Of the 50 million people whose access tokens we believed were affected, about 30 million actually had their tokens stolen.”
The company revealed, as part of its ongoing investigation with the FBI, that hackers gained access to personal data, such as name, contact information, demographic details, hometown, birthdate, and details of other friends found on a user’s profile. Facebook has also set up a Help Center to check if you’re a victim of the hack.
To check to see if your account was impacted by the hack, you’ll need to navigate to the Help Center and log into your Facebook account.
Facebook passwords were not compromised as part of the hack. However, if you’re one of the 14 million users affected in the second category, you may want to keep an eye on banking, financial, and other sites. Given that they already have access to a lot of personal information, hackers can use complex social engineering techniques to pretend to be you, TechCrunch cautioned.
Facebook has not revealed the identity of the hacker or hackers behind this recent attack because of the ongoing investigation. The social network noted that hackers were not able to access data on other platforms that it owns, including Messenger, Messenger Kids, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Pages, payments, third-party apps, or advertising or developer accounts. Private messages were also not impacted.
