How to Check if Your Password Has Been Stolen

Website breaches are now becoming a common occurrence. We are starting to hear about big websites being compromised almost on a unpleasantly frequent basis these days. Adobe’s major breach and more recently SnapChat’s data breach has clearly exposed the vulnerabilities of reusing passwords. With over 154 million email addresses (and consequently their passwords) being exposed, how do you know if the email address and passwords you used to create many of your accounts are leaked out? Not to worry, Troy Hunt has built a cool tool that lets you check if you have been pwned.

Unlike some tools that only let you check if a certain account, say LinkedIn, Yahoo, or Gawker account has been exposed, Have I Been Pwned is a tool that lets you check for multiple breaches of accounts. What’s more you can now get notifications if any of your accounts get compromised any time in the future.

How to Check if Your Password Has Been Stolen

The whole thing is pretty straightforward. Just head over to  haveibeenpwned.com.

Enter your email address or username in the text field and hit the pwned button. You will instantly get results of accounts where data has been breached your account compromised.

All the data in this website comes from publicly available records of website breaches. Currently 8 breached accounts are included, Adobe, Snapchat, Stratfor, Gawker, Yahoo, Vodafone, Pixel Federation and Sony.

To receive notification of any future breaches, just hit the Notify Me menu link; enter the email address and the captcha text and click notify me of pwnage.

You will receive a verification email and once the confirmation is complete you will receive notifications automatically in case of any further pwnage.

You can add as many email accounts as you like to receive notifications from.

Have I Been Pwned is a fantastic, simple, yet free service that saves you the hassle of worrying about whether your accounts have been compromised or not, especially if its an account you opened years ago and have simply forgotten about its existence now.

Check out the website, see if your account has been compromised and be aware of all future breaches with its easy to use notification feature.

Remember to always play safe with passwords, use a good password manager and you should be safe than sorry in this era of data breaches.