Recently, over 533 million Facebook account information has been leaked from over 100 countries. Be sure to beef up your cybersecurity and surveillance self-defense efforts to defend against increasing phishing schemes and scams.

If you have a Facebook account that wasn’t set to private before 2019 (Facebook has been less than transparent about this data breach), your cell phone at the very least is compromised, and at the most, they also have your email, company, relationship status, city/state information.

I checked the leaked data and found several family members’ cell phones on there, and also a number of friends, colleagues, and clients–so I am making this post public to alert more of you. You are now a target of many bad actors. Here are some things you can do for greater cyber resilience and security:

Make sure Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is implemented and/or use a physical authenticator

2FA requires you to verify a code on your phone, using text message, or an authenticator app like Google Authenticator (be sure to save recovery codes with Google authenticator), or via hardware like the Google Titan Security Key. It should be implemented both personally and across your organization, such as through Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).

Don’t click on any link from unknown text messages

If you aren’t expecting a 2FA code, or the number isn’t from someone you know, don’t click it and block the number. You are a target of phishing schemes or scams regularly already.

If you don’t know the sender of the email, don’t click on links as it may be a phishing scheme or scam. Be sure to report it as phishing and/or mark it as spam.

Enable spam call filtering

Explore additional surveillance self-defense measures

The world needs a better online experience, and it must be built with empathy–designed for people-first and with privacy as the default. Check out the Surveillance Self-Defense resource here by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Some measures may also include a VPN.

Get and use the privacy-first Brave Browser

Your personal data is a commodity in this day and age and that’s unacceptable. Lucky for you, there is an excellent browser called Brave which also rewards you with cryptocurrency if you choose to enable ads.

Brave Browser is reported to be 3x faster than Google Chrome, and is the first application with cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token, to crack 1 million users, and stands at 29 million monthly users. Get Brave here, free.

My recommendation for professional help for an organization without an IT Department, Support, or access to Cybersecurity experts

Need help for your company? Reach out to a good friend, Jim Smith of Proper Sky, a team of expert IT specialists with cybersecuritymanaged IT services, and more.