With the biggest days for online shopping coming up fast, it’s a good time to remind you of a site that lets you know if your email address is among those compromised in a data breach.
Have I Been Pwned, draws information from publicly leaked lists of breaches on various sites and put that information all together in one place where you can search to see if your information has been compromised. What this site tells you is if your email address was found in those lists. You can click here to check it out.
If you’re in the clear, you see this result.
If it’s been compromised, you see this.
The idea is that you now know to go change your email address and pay close attention to any signs that your identity has been stolen or bank account compromised. The site doesn’t have any actual access to your accounts. They can’t know that you’ve changed your password and secured your account or that you’ve deactivated an account that you no longer use. The only info they have is if your email address was contained in those leaked lists.
Even if you completely deactivate an account, the address will still be there because it was on the list of breached email addresses.
If your data has been compromised, you can scroll down to see which breach or breaches included your data. Just check the dates to see if it’s recent.
The site also features a list of the largest breaches.
And the most recently reported breaches that you may not know about yet.
