New Delhi:
Are you a Facebook savvy? Frequently posting on walls, commenting or updating every details of your life? Then this latest website set up by Facebook is pretty much for you. Yes! The Mark Zuckerberg Company has come up with a new website which can reveal if hackers did gain access to your Facebook account or that personal information you shared with your loved ones.
The unprecedented move came barely hours after the social media giant Friday disclosed that a recent hacking into its system has affected about 30 million users, utilising some of their personal information like gender, relationship status, hometown, date of birth, name, contact details and other info— might be even more unsettling.
However, the hackers were not able to access more sensitive information such as password or financial updates. Even third-party apps and Facebook-owned Messenger, Messenger Kids, Instagram and WhatsApp weren’t affected owing to this recent vulnerability in Facebook's code that existed of between July 2017 to September 2018.
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According to the social network the problem has been fixed now and they are still looking at other ways the hackers may have used the platform.
Meanwhile, to cooperate with its 2 billion global users and notify people that what information was accessed from their account, Facebook has set up a new website which will also provide guidance on how to spot and deal with suspicious emails or texts.
Following some preliminary information about the investigation, a question - “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?” will appear midway down the page. It will also provide information specific to your account if you’re logged into Facebook.
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Here is the complete process to check if you are a victim of the cyber hack?
In order to check if your account was affected by the hack, you should navigate to the Help Center and log into your Facebook account.
- Once you’re in the Help Center, you need to scroll down. At the bottom of the page, you will find a section titled “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue.”
- Facebook will give you a quick yes or no response, along with any added details.
- If the response was yes, then Facebook will tell you what kinds of information hackers had access to as part of the hack.
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As part of the information that we will be sharing with users over, we will be including information as to how they can watch out for any suspicious e-mails or text messages or things of that sort," Facebook product management vice president Guy Rosen said.
Facebook will also send messages directly to those affected by the attack. "We will also work to contact people who may not be on Facebook any longer," he added.
For those unserved, the attackers used a portion of 400,000 people's lists of friends to steal access tokens for about 30 million people. For 15 million people, attackers accessed two sets of information, name and contact details - phone number, email, or both, depending on what people had on their profiles.
For another 14 million people, the attack was potentially more damaging as the hackers accessed both their name and contact details as well as other details like username, gender, location, language, relationship status, religion, hometown, date of birth, device types used to access Facebook, education, work details, places they have recently "checked in" to as visiting, people or pages they follow and the 15 most recent searches.
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For the remaining one million people whose access token were stolen, the attackers did not access any information.
