How to Tell Your Facebook Account Was Hacked

Over the weekend a work college sent me a message through WhatsApp. He took a screenshot of a notice from Facebook categorically telling him that his Facebook (Alex) Account was compromised in the recent Facebook hack. 

I don’t know how many Zambian users have been affected apart from the above mentioned or Facebook is still informing its users.

A particularized security notice to a Zambian user from Facebook about the recent hack

But this brings us to what Facebook is doing about the recent hack of their platform. In their Help Center Facebook have updated and apologized to their users. They also lowered the number  of affected people from 50 to 30 million. Though they still say the investigations are ongoing.

We previously announced a security incident on Facebook and want to provide an update on our investigation. We have now determined that attackers used access tokens to gain unauthorized access to account information from approximately 30 million Facebook accounts.

We’re very sorry this happened. Your privacy is incredibly important to us, and we want to update you on what we’ve learned from our ongoing investigation, including which Facebook accounts are impacted, what information was accessed and what Facebook users can do about this.

How to Tell Your Facebook Account Was Affected

So how can i tell my Facebook account was recently hacked? In the recent past and some years a way surfaced on social media and Facebook where hundreds of discussions occurred in Zambia about how to tell your Facebook account was hacked.

Others suggested typing @[4:0] and that if it does not reveal name Mark Zuckerberg then your account is hacked.

Learn More on issues affecting you Facebook: What Does Typing @[4:0] in Facebook Comment Mean

But its very simple how to tell your Facebook account was hacked. Facebook has setup a security notice in the Help Center concerning the hack. If you are on the knowing path here is how to check if your account was affected.

• In your Facebook Account navigate to help center 
• Login into Facebook if prompted or if you are not already logged in
• A lengthy post explains on the recent hack and at the Bottom their is a section

Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?

From here Facebook will explicitly tell you whether your account was affected or not.

Facebook will tell in their Help Center whether you have been impacted by the hack

Whats Next

The investigations are ongoing and Facebook will give more updates. Facebook explained when they discovered and how this attacked happened and what you need to do as a user. For starter their is no need to change the password. About 90 million users access tokens thought to be potentially affected were invalidated preventing any attackers access. the attackers had access to accounts between 15th and 27th September 2018.

Affected users where logged out for the system asked to login back to Facebook to prevent any further attackers access. However Facebook has not said who was behind the attack