Have I Been Pwned? – An amazing service that keeps track of all the companies that have been hacked and had their data breached. They find the accounts included in the breaches and load the email addresses a website that can be searched to tell you if your account details or other personal information has been leaked.
Huge companies have been hacked and lost their customer data to hackers – Facebook, LinkedIn, Sony. Nobody is immune, even huge companies whose focus is security have been breached.
What does it mean?
Well, it means that a service or website you have an account on has had a breach at somepoint and some personal information was stolen. This varies on what types of information about you was stolen, it could just be your email address, or could include your password, your address even your credit card data. This of course varies from breach to breach
What can you do?
Not too much unfortunately. It has become the price we pay for having accounts on services. We put our trust in them that they will securely store our personal information. Sometimes that trust is broken and the data is able to be retrieved and accessed.
Hopefully, and in most cases, your passwords and sensitive information like credit card numbers are stored encrypted and remain encrypted so that information should be safe in a breach.
When you search for your email address, it might display a list of breaches your email account is associated with. It will detail what kind of information was included in the breach.
If you see your email address in the list, don’t panic. Just change your passwords. Remember using the same password on every site is a bad idea, if they get one password that they know you use, they will try it everywhere.
What does “pwned” mean? (paraphrased from their website)
It is [internet lingo] typically used to imply that someone has been controlled or compromised, for example “I was pwned in the Adobe data breach”.
