Private information from around 533 million Facebook accounts was leaked online by hackers last week. Cyber Intelligence firm Hudson Rock said information including names, phone numbers, birthdays, relationship status, bios, Facebook IDs, locations and for some cases email addresses, were leaked. 

The leak included data from over 32 million accounts in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom and 6 million accounts in India, CNN reported. 

Also Read | Hackers scraped personal data of over 530 million Facebook users in 2019

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told CNN that it was an old breach, from August 2019, and that the issue has since been found and fixed. 

However, a lot of that data, like birthdays and phone numbers, can still be used by hackers today. Here’s what you need to know about the leak and steps you can take to protect yourself:

How bad is it?

Although the latest Facebook breach is concerning, it is far from alarming. Unless you are new to internet and social media, chances are private information linked to your account have been leaked online as data breaches have become an increasingly common occurrence. 

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Additionally, the data leaked does not contain the most useful information for hackers, like credit card, bank details or social security numbers.

However, the data can still be misused in a number of ways. With information such as names and phone numbers included, users could be targeted for scam calls an other spam. 

It could also lead to an increase in social engineering attacks such as phishing. And given that a wide variety of data from each was leaked in the breach, it could lead to a higher success rate of such attacks. 

Steps to protect yourself

This hack goes on to show that any data you share online is never really completely secure. You can go online and check out websites like haveibeenpwned.com to see whether your data has been leaked online. 

The results of this method is not always accurate and Facebook has not confirmed if it will alert those users whose data has been breached. 

Also Read | Hackers tap into 150,000 security cameras at banks, jails, Tesla to expose ‘surveillance state’

If your account has been compormised, beware of phishing attempts. Do not give any private information to any caller, unless you are the one initiating the conversation or transaction. 

Experts also advise to maintain ‘data hygine’, such as having different passwords for different websites, changing your password frequently and using two-factor authentication.