Facebook has offered up a simple tool to let you know if your account has been compromised by its recent massive breach or in previous breaches.
Being security conscious has always been important, but in recent years, it’s become downright imperative. Hacks and leaks are happening at an alarming rate, which means we all need to be more cognizant about our digital security every day. When an incident does end up taking place, we also need to be on top of things, enacting recovery plans and swift damage control efforts. At the very least, it means a password change for the affected service would be in order. However, there are other steps you’ll want to consider for social networking services like Facebook that stores a massive amount of personal user data.
Recently, Facebook discovered that a large number of its users fell victim to a vulnerability exploit, allowing attackers to access login tokens — which is enough to let them access individual user accounts another user. Facebook quickly halted 90 million accounts while the issue was investigated, but has since settled on 30 million as being the actual number of impacted accounts.
Fortunately, the mega social network platform has made it easy to figure out whether or not you’ve been affected: all you need to do is visit this page and read the message in a box found near the end of the page. If you’re a-OK, you’ll see a message like this one:
If you get another message, it means your account was affected, but it doesn’t appear as though you’d have to do anything about it. Usually, changing your password seems like a common sense thing to do, but in this particular case, Facebook says it’s unnecessary, implying that tokens were the only thing attackers had access to. That’s almost unusual at this point, but it saves a lot of headache for affected users. You can always change that password anyway if you just want to be safe (sound advice), or have been using the same password for too long a period of time. Again, it’s important to practice safe security, early and often.
