Facebook Reveals Hackers Had Access to Millions of Phone Numbers

Facebook said this week that a recent security breach had given hackers access to millions of phone numbers as well as email addresses.

Originally reported last month, Facebook had said that 50 million users were impacted but now that number is actually about 30 million.

Among the 30 million users affected, 14 million had their names, contact details, sensitive information such as their gender, relationship status and recent location check-ins exposed.

Facebook also published a website where users can check if their accounts were affected by the security breach.

“People’s accounts have already been secured by the action we took two weeks ago to reset the access tokens for people who were potentially exposed—no one needs to log out again, and no one needs to change their password,” says Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product management.

“We’ll be explaining what information the attackers may have accessed as well as steps they can take to help protect themselves from any suspicious emails or text messages or calls that could potentially result from this kind of information being exposed. ”

Hackers used 400,000 accounts under their control to gain the access tokens of 30 million Facebook users, according to the social media company’s blog post.

15 million users had their names and contact information breached, and 1 million users solely had their access tokens stolen. Facebook has since reset the access tokens for all of those users.

The breach is under investigation by the FBI, which asked Facebook “not to discuss who may be behind this attack.”

“We are still looking at other ways the people behind these attacks may have used Facebook, and we haven’t ruled out the possibility of smaller scale, low-level access attempts,” said Rosen.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) and have not been compensated for this article.