How to Check if Your Phone Number was Leaked in Facebook Breach

Due to a software vulnerability, a database containing the personal information of 533 million Facebook users is now circulating on the open internet. So why isn’t Facebook notifying who’s been affected? Well, the company hasn’t given a straight answer on the matter, except to emphasize the leaked data comes from an already patched vulnerability. “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019,” the social network said in a statement.

More than 500 Million Facebook Users’ Data is now on a Website for Hackers

As a result, to find out whether you were ensnared in the Facebook data leak, don’t rely on the social network. Instead, you’ll have to use a third-party website to find out. Or you could try downloading the database yourself. The 20GB archive has already been freely circulating on the internet via a torrent for days now, putting affected users at greater risk. Good thing we are here to make it easy for you by directing you to an online security platform Have I Been Pwned which has added the ability for users to check if their mobile number has been compromised in the recent Facebook data leak.

Have I Been Pwned has always allowed people to search across multiple data breaches to see if their email address has been compromised. Have I Been Pwned founder, Troy Hunt has now added phone numbers to the search functionality because of the Facebook data leak. “There’s been huge interest in the Facebook incident, and I’ve seen near-unprecedented traffic to Have I Been Pwned over the last couple of days,” Hunt said.

He never planned to make phone numbers searchable. The Facebook data leak, however, changed his view. “There’s over 500 million phone numbers, but only a few million email addresses in the Facebook leak,” he said. “This means 99% of people were getting a miss when they should have gotten a hit”.

Hunt said the phone numbers were easy to parse out from well-formatted files. “They were also all normalised into a consistent format with a country code,” he said. Therefore, Facebook users who want to see if their personal information has been compromised in the Facebook leak can visit Have I Been Pwned and enter their mobile number.

All phone numbers are stored with their country calling code, for instance, Zimbabwean numbers start with 263.

To search for your number, you can add 263 in front of your number and drop the leading 0.

The number 0713366444 will therefore change to 263713366444.

It should be emphasized that if your number returns a positive result, it does not mean your password has been compromised. However, credentials such as your full names, birthdates, location data, and email addresses, could have been exposed alongside your phone number.