The Privacy Guarantor also moves on the illicit publication of 533 million Facebook data, including those of about 36 million Italians, because the problem is serious.
The Guarantor for the protection of personal data has asked the social network to make a service immediately available that allows all Italian users to check whether their telephone number or email address has been affected by the violation.
However, there are already tools, even if not from Facebook, to do this verification. The Guarantor also suggests some remedies to limit the problems that may arise.
How to find out if our email or mobile phone has gone online
First we understand if our data has also ended up in the pile. There are many tools available, some published these days and whose reliability is uncertain (some experts suspect they can be used to hoard numbers). You can certainly use a long-known tool, https://haveibeenpwned.com, which in these hours has also indexed the Italian numbers that ended up in the data breach, which we recall dates back to 2019 even if now it has worsened because the data is available easily and free online to everyone. publicly. The well-known expert Pierluigi Paganini recommends using https://cyber-leaks.com/ which in particular tells us if the mobile number has been published. A fact that potentially lends itself to more serious criminal uses.
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The risks
The Guarantor himself writes that “the telephone number could be used for a series of illegal conduct, ranging from unwanted calls and messages to serious threats such as the so-called” SIM swapping “, an attack technique that allows access to the number phone number of the legitimate owner and violate certain types of online services that use the telephone number as an authentication system “. Basically with that data, a criminal can try to get the number registered on a sim that he controls and so can scam o intercept one time password with which to empty the current account of the victim.
Tips for limiting damage
The Authority also reminds all users affected by the violation to the need to pay particular attention, in the coming weeks, to any anomalies connected to their telephone users: such as, for example, the sudden absence of a field in places where the mobile phone normally has a good reception. Such an event could be a signal that a criminal has stolen our phone number to use it for fraudulent purposes.In this case it is important to immediately contact your telephone operator’s call center to verify the reasons for the problem and, in particular, to verify that third parties, pretending to be us, have not requested and obtained a transfer of our number to another SIM. Finally, the Guarantor draws the attention of all users to the importance of being wary of any text messages coming from the telephone number of people we know, with whom they are asked for money, help or personal data, because it could be a scam operated by malicious people who have stolen that number. ESET experts recommend changing your Facebook password and enabling authentication to two factors, to limit further abuse on profiles. In this regard, some experts – such as Paolo dal Checco – advise no also, against the sim swap danger “of verifying if the ‘stolen’ number is used for two-factor authentication access to some services. In that case, replace it with another number or alternatively use authentication apps such as Google Auth. “” In the same way, with that number an attacker can understand if the user has registered to other platforms and then use it to try to do unauthorized access. The advice is therefore also to remove the number in question from the other platforms where we have inserted it; at least temporarily, ”says Dal Checco.