How do I check if my data has been breached?

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We hear more and more often about data leaks or data breach. What does it mean? It means that some site's database has been compromised in some way and some sensitive data may have been breached. There are various examples, including Italian ones. An example above all is the over 600,000 user data of the email.it provider available on the dark web hey databases stolen from Facebook. If you are wondering: “And how do I check if my data has been violated?” this is the article for you.

Throughout the article we will mainly call them data breach because it is a technical name that means a very specific thing, in Italian we could call it data breach personal but it is less understandable in common language.

The data breach it is not to be confused with other problems such as what happened to the INPS website in early April (do you remember?). In that case indeed it seems that it was a cache problem ¹.

Use a password manager

Why is it important to talk about data breach? Because there is a really gigantic and certainly incomplete list of violations, you can see it here. As you can see no one is immune to it. Every time a data breach our data is in danger. Sometimes they can also be taken username And password. And it is exactly for this reason that you should never, ever use the same password on multiple accounts.

Even if you are the most careful person in the world, if a multiple password were discovered you would be in danger on multiple fronts. This is why it is essential to use a password manager as Bitwarden and use a different password for each account. This way, even if one of your accounts were hacked, you would still be safe.

How do I check if my data has been breached? Blackmail via email

Lately ² it is also very fashionable to receive an email where an alleged hacker says he has videos of you masturbating and to prove that he is telling the truth he reveals your password. The most shocking thing is that the password is actually one of the ones you usually use!

In this case the first thing to do is not to panic: nHe doesn't know your password because he hacked your computer but because your password was probably for (dis)sale on some database on the dark web. And he's trying to extort money from you. Provided that use a camera cover It's not necessarily a bad idea ³, the most important thing to do is to never use the same passwords. And possibly change it if the one you received corresponds to some of your accounts that are still active.

How do I check if my data has been breached?

After this long, but necessary, introduction, let's now return to the initial question: How do I check if my data has been breached? There are sites that can do these checks for you. Don't worry: you won't have to enter your passwords Obviously. Only the email address you want to check. If the address entered is present in one or more violated databases, you will often also be told which database it is in and which data is at risk. If you find your email in one of these data breach the advice is to change password of that account!

It is highly recommended that you sign up to at least one of these sites to receive a notification when a database containing your email is hacked.

Here is a list of sites to visit

• Have I been pwned?, is one of the most famous sites of all and probably the most reliable and well-known. You can also sign up and receive an email if your address is found on any list. It was also announced that the code will soon become Open source ⁴;

• Bitwarden, especially if you already use it as a password manager. For users only Premium in fact, it offers automatic control of your data ⁵;

• Firefox Monitor, Also Mozilla has released its own service to search for data breaches that is based on the data and database of Have I been pwned? ⁶ (thanks for the tip). Enter your email and always stay up to date on what's happening on the dark web. The code for this service is Open source ⁷;

• LeakCheck, unlike the previous ones, is a paid professional service that allows you to check hundreds of emails and usernames daily. It can be very interesting for a company;

• Snusbase, this is also a paid service. It has been around since 2016 and is very reliable;

• GhostProject.fr, free and with a collection of over one million four hundred thousand credentials collected. We tried it but it seems less reliable than the previous ones;

• I Got Phished, let's insert this wildcard last. It does not check whether your data has been violated but allows you to report phishing attempts so as to prevent someone from falling for it sooner or later.

Finally, we recommend the interesting reading of the article by Motherboard (Vice) called How to recognize a phishing message before you fall for it.

1. https://www.punto-informatico.it/inps-ddos-azure-akamai-cache/[↩]
2. Got An Email From A Hacker With Your Password? Do These 3 Things[↩]
3. You should also cover the front camera of your smartphone[↩]
4. I'm Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Code Base[↩]
5. Vault Health Reports[↩]
6. Firefox Monitor Server on GitHub[↩]
7. Firefox Monitor on GitHub[↩]

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