Check If Your Email Account Has Been Compromised With ‘Have I Been Pwned?’

Alarm continues to spread over the news that the security of nearly 2 million Sony, Facebook, Yahoo and other online accounts has been compromised by hackers who stole users’ passwords and usernames.

In case you’ve had an accounts on these services and have been wondering whether you’ve been among those unlucky ones whose personal information was leaked or compromised during those attacks, there’s a new web service called Have I Been Pwned? that offers an extremely way to determine whether your account information has been ‘compromised in a data breach’.

For those unfamiliar with the word ‘Pwned‘, a quick look at Wikipedia reveals it to be a ‘leetspeak’ slang term derived from the verb ‘Owned’, which means taking control of something.

Getting back to the service, Have I Been Pwned basically tells you whether your account was really ‘Pwned’ or not. Here’s how:

Simply head to HaveIBeenPwned website, enter your email address on the home page and click the “pwned?” button to the right. The website will take a few seconds to analyze your email, and then if you’re safe, it will give you a green signal with a message stating ‘no pwnage found!’. On the other hand, if your email account is indeed among any of the lists of stolen accounts, you’ll be warned about the number of sites where your account information might have been leaked.

Image Credit: grahamcluley.com

With that information in your hands, you will have to take further measures to safeguard your account on your own, either via changing the password associated with that account as well as all other accounts where you used the same password, or deactivating that account.

The site, which was launched last December 4 by Software Architect Troy Hunt, currently matches user’s email address against the data leaked in Adobe, Yahoo, Gawker, Pixel Federation, Stratfor, and Sony website breaches.

Have I Been Pwned also offers integration into your website using an HTML snippet that you can embed into the code of your site.

Though services like HaveIBeenPwned offer a great way to check if your account log-in information has been compromised, there are preventive measures all Web users should still be sure to take. For example, if you are one of the many thousands of people whose password is still ‘123456‘, as was revealed during the October Adobe breach, you should probably change that.

Source: ibtimes.com, addictivetips.com