
Have any of
your online accounts been hacked because of Heartbleed? Have hackers
breached your accounts using other means? Thanks to a few free
websites, it’s remarkably easy to tell if your data might be at risk.
Forbes
contributor Adam Tanner recently put together a simple piece listing
three websites that will inform users of whether or not their accounts
have been hacked.
The first
is haveibeenpwned.com and as the name might suggest, it serves a single
purpose: it tells you if any of your online accounts have been “pwned,”
or breached by hackers. Using the site takes just a few seconds —
simply enter an email address and the site will check to see if
associated accounts have been compromised in any one of thousands of
known breaches.
Two other services listed by Forbes, PwnedList and
Shouldichangemypassword.com, work the same way but may have access to
slightly different data, so it’s not a bad idea to use all three free
sites.
Also, you can sign up
on any of these sites to be notified in the future if any of your
accounts are breached. Just like the initial checks, the monitoring
services offered by these sites are also free.
Steve
Thomas, a co-founder of PwnedList, says that his site learns of about a
dozen different breaches and data leaks each day, in which anywhere
from 100,000 to 500,000 accounts are compromised. As we showed you
recently in a terrifying interactive map of real-time cyberattacks, the threat is huge and ongoing… and the Internet will never be 100% safe.
What
should you do if any of these services find that your accounts may have
been exposed? First and foremost, change your password immediately and
make sure you choose a password that is unique and complex. As always,
we recommend using a password management solution such as 1password.
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This article was originally published on BGR.com
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