Have You Been Breached?

Have you been breached?

Statistically, yes. The average email address appears in multiple breach dumps, usually from services you forgot you signed up to in 2014. The question is not whether your data leaked, it is which passwords went with it, and whether you still use them.

Step 1 // Check your email

Search your address on Have I Been Pwned, the industry-standard breach index run by Troy Hunt. Free, legitimate, and it doesn't store what you type.

Step 2 // Check your passwords

Use Pwned Passwords. It uses k-anonymity, meaning your actual password never leaves your device. If it scores above zero, retire it everywhere.

Step 3 // Check your domain

Run a company? HIBP offers free domain monitoring so you hear about staff credentials in dumps before an infostealer operator does. Our infostealer case file explains why this matters.

Step 4 // Set the alarm

Subscribe to breach notifications. The gap between "dump published" and "credentials used" is sometimes hours. You want to be inside that window, not after it.

Found yourself in a breach? The first hour

Change the breached password first, then everywhere you reused it (this is why we don't reuse them, agent). Turn on multi-factor authentication on email and banking before anything else, since email resets every other account. Check the account's forwarding rules and recovery details, attackers plant those as backdoors. Then move every account into a password manager and let it generate something our Interrogation Room would grade A.

One more thing: a wave of "your data was breached, click to secure your account" emails follows every public breach. Those are phish riding the news cycle. Verify on the real site, never via the email. Trained for that? Prove it.