Facebook data hack? Yes, so what now?

[razz]

I read the cnn article about the data hack. I entered my email in the third-party website which indicated that I have been 'pwned'.
"Oh no — pwned!
Pwned in 3 data breaches and found no pastes "

I have very little info on Facebook account, no friends or family connections as I only used FB to access some local businesses to see when they are open.
The article didn't indicate any action that I should take. Any advice?


"Facebook said that massive leak stems from an issue in 2019, which has since been fixed. Still, there's no clawing back that data. More than 30 million accounts in the United States were affected and the company isn't making it easy to find out if your data was included in the breach.
But a third-party website, haveibeenpwned.com, makes it simple to check by inputting your email. For now, it just checks if your email was among those stolen.
That's a pretty big catch: Although 533 million Facebook accounts were included in the breach, only 2.5 million of those included emails in the stolen data. So you've got less than a half-percent chance of showing up on that website, even though you've got about a 20% chance of being hacked if you've got a Facebook account.

[Alan]

As I understand it, the exposed data consists of email address and telephone number, if provided. I think the takeaway is that you should never provide real info to social media platforms and use secondary email addresses for login info and multi-factor authentication purposes. That's what I do.

[razz]

Thanks, Alan. I now have some work to do to set up a new email and modify the verification for my personal info. I do have multi-factor for master and financial passwords.

[jp1]

The biggest risk is that lots of people use the same password for various different accounts. When hackers get lists of stolen email/password combos they then go to all sorts of other sites like banks and try those email password combos to see if they can get in.

Generally when I learn about a breach like this I change my password on the affected account just to be safe and then go on with my life. I use a password manager so I have a different random password for anything that I have an account for. And all my financial institutions I’ve set up with two factor authentication.