You can now check to see if your account has been breached.
A web developer named Troy Hunt has developed a website that will allow you to enter your email address to see if your credentials were exposed from some of the largest data breaches in recent years.
This website allows you to check the Adobe Systems breach from this year, The Yahoo breach of 2012, The Sony and Stratfor breaches in 2011, and the Gawker Breach in 2010.
In October Adobe systems had the largest breach in publicly-known existence. Over 153 million user accounts were compromised, including user records, email addresses, and poorly encrypted passwords during this incident.
Hunt analyzed the data from the breaches and found that of the people who used the same email from accounts in Sony and Yahoo, 59 percent of the people used the same password.
The website haveibeenpwned.com does not store any passwords and when asked why he does not store the passwords he had this to say. “I just don’t need them [the passwords] and frankly, I don’t want the responsibility either,” Hunt said in a blog post. “This is all about raising awareness of the breadth of breaches.”
Putting up this site was not an easy task due to the large amount of data that is referenced during a single query.
When Hunt combined all of these databases into a single database there was much revealed about the correlation between email address. Each database contained about 20 percent. This was more inspiration for Hunt to create this site.
Hunt has plans on adding any additional publicly known data breaches to his site, however he did have this to say, “No, don’t go and breach a system in order to contribute to this project!”
