The popular social networking sites like Facebook show a complicated record on privacy. Earlier, there was a news about a vulnerability discovered in Facebook ‘View As’ feature. It unknowingly exposed information of 50 million accounts. Now, reports have emerged that hackers had access to the users’ important information. This is a worrying development. If you are interested in checking whether your Facebook account was hacked or not, read the instructions below.

Check if your Facebook Account was breached

There, scroll down to the section “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?”

Here you’ll see a Yes or No answer under ‘Was this information helpful?’ section.

This indicates your account was not compromised and you were not one of the 30 million users impacted.

The breached Facebook accounts, on the other hand, will show a ‘Yes’ alongside some confirmation from Facebook. Here, you might find yourself belonging to one of the following categories –

One in the 15 million users’ whose personal information like name, email or phone number was compromised.
One in the 14 million users’ whose latest activities were noted.
One in the 1 million users whose access token was stolen.

The only fortunate event in all the above cases was no hackers could access sensitive information like user’s financial credentials, credit card info or passwords. There’s no evidence that data was accessed in the attack. Nevertheless it would be a good idea to change your password and use a strong one.

For other accounts, especially the ones belonging to the 2^nd group, it is advisable to resort to more secure ways like adding a pin code to your account information. Doing so will help in adding an additional layer of security and not falling prey to any sort of social engineering attacks.

Lastly, if you are of the view that the networking website does not feature adequate safeguards for your privacy and doesn’t deserve to host what you share, you can consider quitting Facebook.

Take care, stay safe, and be aware of the consequences of Oversharing On Social Media.