Hackers have been breaching and releasing sensitive and private data for years now, and the practice has only been accelerated over the last few days. The latest violation of Yahoo and MySpace accounts report to have compromised half a billion accounts across the globe, and it is sure to create shock-waves in the digital world for many years to come. Often the leaks come from third-party sites, like the one on Forbes, where you have created an account to sign in.
So the question comes, were you part of this mega leak? Or maybe the innumerable ones before this? Maybe, maybe not. But it is always good to know and take necessary caution.
Haveibeenpwned.com is a site that aims to enable you to check whether your account has been hacked or not. And hacking just doesn’t mean that your username and password were compromised. It can also comprise of your personal data, such as name, date of birth, social security number and even your credit card and bank account number to be compromised and “pasted” on several forums.
Haveibeenpwned.com collects all the latest leaks, puts them in their database and provides an easy way for the average Joe to find out whether your data has been leaked or not.
Another site, Shouldichangemypassword.com, finds both the compromised email addresses gives a date of the hack, but doesn’t tell where the issues occurred. Both of the sites are free and offer to notify users in the future if their email address has been compromised.
It is estimated that PwnedList learns of about a dozen different data leaks every day, with 100,000 to 500,000 compromised accounts and information on the web.
You probably should check your accounts’ status right now!
And hey, even if it’s not compromised, it is best to change your password to a complex one and use a password manager to keep them safe and secure. It is also a good idea to use the phone verification security layer that most of the email hosting services provide these days.