What If Your Username & Password Is Hacked Or Stolen? This Website Lets You Know For Sure
Have I Been Pwned lets you know if your email and login data has been compromised or leaked in a hack attack or website data breach. All you need to do is enter in your email address to know if you need to change your login password or not.
The online world can be a dangerous place, if you aren't careful. And even then, for no fault of yours, hack attacks on websites can leave you and your data vulnerable and exposed.
But there's a way you can find out if your popular online login credentials have been compromised by hackers.
Hackers routinely break into popular websites
Unlike malware and ransomware attacks like WannaCry, which catches popular headlines all over the world, the shady and covert data breaches that mainstream websites experience largely go unreported. In the last five years, websites like Adobe.com, LinkedIn.com, Dropbox.com, Dailymotion.com, Tumblr.com, and even Snapchat, have suffered data breaches. It means hackers have broken into these websites to steal a large amount of login credentials. Over 500 million login credentials, and counting. These login credentials are then sold on the black market to the highest bidder.
How are you at risk?
Most often than not, a lot of us have the same login email and password for a large number of websites -- which is a bad practice. Because if you register for Facebook and LinkedIn using the same email address and password, because of the LinkedIn hack, your Facebook login is also equally compromised (even though Facebook wasn't hacked).
Have you been pwned yet?
Thanks to the effort of Troy Hunt, a security expert, www.haveibeenpwned.com is a free website that lets anyone check if their login credentials have been compromised or "pwned" in a data breach.
You just need to enter your username or email address (used for logging into your several web accounts), to see if accounts linked to them have been hacked or breached.
And in case your login credentials have been compromised or leaked in a hacker data breach, the website throws a "Oh no ¡ª pwned!" message and lists that sites through which your login information was stolen.
For those websites, it's prudent to quickly change your login password. And going forward, try to keep unique username and password combinations for your different online accounts.
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