30 million Facebook users have personal data accessed by hackers

Facebook said today that it has experienced the biggest security breach in its history as 30 million users had their email addresses and phone numbers viewed by hackers. Nearly half of those 30 million also had other personal data accessed including the area where they live, their religious affiliation, relationship status and search history. Facebook says that it isn't sure whether other, "smaller-scale attacks" are involved with this breach.

According to Facebook,  the hackers were able to access the following information from the 14 million users who were hit hardest by the attack: "Username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches."

To find out whether your personal data was accessed by the attackers, click on this link. Scroll down to a light blue box with the title "Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?" If your account was not compromised, you will see a message that reads "Based on what we've learned so far, your Facebook account has not been impacted by this security incident. If we find more Facebook accounts were impacted, we will reset their access tokens and notify those accounts."

If your account was accessed, the light blue box in the help center will look like the one in the image below.

Back on September 28th, Facebook originally announced that 50 million accounts had been vulnerable to attack thanks to a security breach. The breach allowed hackers to steal Facebook access tokens that allowed these attackers to access members' accounts. The company reset the tokens for the 50 million and an additional 40 million to play it safe. While Facebook said today that "We now know that fewer people were impacted than we originally thought," this is not the time for the firm to be gloating.

The FBI is "actively investigating" the breach and has told Facebook not to reveal the name of the group behind the hack, or make any other information public that could compromise its investigation.

source: CNN, @donie