The leaked details of 11 million British Facebook users have been discovered on a hacking website.
More than 500 million users of the social media site have been affected by a data breach, it has been reported.
Facebook says the stolen data is old and was taken during a breach in 2019.
Information such as phone numbers, names, birthdays and locations are said to be just some of the data taken.
If you want to find out if you have been included in the breach, you can follow this link here.
This ‘Have I Been Pwned?’ website allows you to input your phone or email address to discover if your details were potentially involved.
Business Insider recently reported on the breach, which saw a user of a low-level hacking forum re-publish the stolen data.
Alon Gal, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, spotted the republished data on the hacker forum.
He told the publication: “A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts.”
Facebook said in a statement: “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”
But, despite the data being old, criminals could still attempt to use it to impersonate people.
The breach also reportedly includes 32 million accounts in the United States and six million in India, with 106 countries thought to be affected in total.
Data breaches have, unfortunately, become fairly common for a wide range of online services, reports CNN.
So unless you hardly ever use the internet or mobile apps, it’s likely that much of your personal information is already out there, the news site said.
