Every few weeks brings another report of email and other personal account information being stolen from a major corporation. Last month a massive viral botnet was discovered stealing the info of over 2 million accounts from Facebook, Google and Yahoo. And the month before that, the details of a whopping 152 million accounts were stolen from Adobe. This may leave you wondering if one of your many accounts across the internet has been exposed, but how do you tell?
There are a slew of sites out there that consolidate the publicly available details from all the major hacks and let you search to see if your email is among them. Some are more useful than others, and some may simply be fronts for email harvesting services, so you need to be careful which you use. Our favorite, haveibeenpwned.com, tells you whether your information has been stolen, where the hack occurred and which of your personal details were compromised (e.g., user name, password, password hints, etc.).
So what do you do when you find one of your accounts has been compromised? It’s time to create a new password and I don’t mean your birthday, pet’s name or the word “password.” You need your password to be smart, but not so complex you forget it. Read More>>