Here’s How to Check If You Have Been Hacked

In the age of the internet, there is nothing worse than finding yourself locked out of your email account all of a sudden. More worryingly, a hacked email can also be used to hack into your social media accounts. Seeing that a person’s online identity is almost a necessity these days, it can be a chore to recreate it from scratch.

Luckily, there are a number of decent tools available to check if your social media or email profile has been hacked. One such tool, called “Have I Been Pwned?”, is one of the fastest and easiest ways to keep a careful eye on your email account.

We hear about massive online data leaks (or hacks) on almost a weekly basis, and it is practically impossible to keep a track of all of them to see if your account was one of them. Have I Been Pwned? solves that problem by letting you search all of them in just a few seconds.

Have I Been Pwned? is capable of letting you know if your account has been “breached”— an incident where a hacker has illegally obtained data from a vulnerable system. All you have to do is head over to Have I Been Pwned? and enter your email id and it will let you know if it has been breached or not. There’s also an option to Notify you in case you get pwned.

All the data on the site comes from website breaches which have been made publicly available. The website lets you search through more than a billion breached accounts as well as around a hundred or so websites.

Created by an Australian web security expert, Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned? exists as a free resource for anyone to quickly assess if they may have been put at risk. Troy decided to form this website after the largest ever single breach of customer accounts — Adobe with over 150 million breached records. It even lets you “Opt out” for a specific email address, so that others can’t see if it has been hacked or not, using the tool.