Was Your Facebook Hacked? Here’s How You Can Find Out

Recently, Facebook was hacked. A massive 30 million accounts were accessed by the attackers.

You might be wondering if your Facebook account was hacked or not. Thankfully, Facebook has provided a way to check. Here’s what you need to do:

1. While logged into your account, visit the following link: https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice?ref=sec
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you see a section that says “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?”Facebook will let you know if you were hacked or not.
3. If you were not hacked then you will see the following message:
4. If, on the other hand, you were indeed hacked, then there are 3 cases that you may belong to:
   1. A group of 15 million users whose name, email plus phone number were accessed.
   2. A group of 14 million users who had the data in “a” above accesses and in addition their account biographical information birthday, gender, username, your mobile phone name, things you’ve recently searched for on Facebook, places you’ve been recently
   3. The last group is 1 million users who were hacked but no information was taken by the attackers.

What To Do Next If You Were Hacked

Don’t worry right now about changing your password because this was not accessed, however, do worry about the information the attackers have about you especially if you are in group b above. The attackers can use some of this information to attack you on other fronts, especially those of you that transact online with Mastercards or Visas.

Hackers that steal personal information usually use it to launch what are called Phishing attacks. These are when you receive messages in your email or even physical mail that purports to be from your bank, company, or other institution you trust. The email will ask you to unknowingly provide them passwords and other such data, which they then use to steal money from you.

Sometimes these attacks will be on your friends. The attackers will generate emails pretending to be you, and they’ll ask your friends to do things on your behalf.

Be on the lookout and act accordingly.

What To Do Next If You Were NOT Hacked

If you were not hacked, you obviously don’t need to do anything. You’re safe. Hopefully, most people reading this fall in this group. However please know that it’s always important to regularly change your password and also be very strict about the apps that you allow to access your Facebook.

Regularly review the apps that have access to your Facebook account and make sure that only those that you strictly intend, do. Here’s how:

1. While on Facebook, click the down-pointing arrow on the top far right of the screen.
2. At the bottom of the drop-down that appears, click on “Settings”
3. Find the “Apps” button on the menu on the left-hand side of the screen and click it
   The page that appears will tell you how many other apps have access to all or some of your Facebook data.
   If you don’t want an app to access your Facebook any longer just click the “x” that appears when you hover over an app. if you have many, like most us, they are many

Even if you were not hacked, it’s possible that some of your friends were. Be on the lookout for messages purporting to be from them. Don’t just click on stuff. Instead, use another platform (e.g. WhatsApp) to check with your friend if they really sent you that Facebook message.