Protect Yourself From Data Breaches
You may have seen news items concerning various data breaches around the globe. It might not mean much to you and you may be unsure if you should even be concerned more than usual.
The latest data breach, only a day or two ago, potentially involves over 2 billion records of emails, personal details, passwords etc. This is big and the odds of your email address being one of them is high (if not in this breach in another previous).
Most of the data breaches have been to companies that store records for marketing purposes, to "wash" a list of email addresses against known lists. So generally - who cares if they know my email and personal details, most are available in the public domain anyway. Well for a start, it is fodder for the hackers to use reliable email lists to target victims.
What does this mean to you from a security risk level?
The main security issue is that passwords may be included in these lists as well, and if you are one of those many people that use the same couple of passwords for all your web services, the hackers will be trying the passwords on all the services they can find. As difficult as it is, you should use a different password for every service.
There is a trusted site to check if your email address is one that has been exposed in any database hacks: https://haveibeenpwned.com/
If you then want to see if your password is one that has been listed, and therefore used in automated hacking tools, check here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords
For security reasons, they do not list email addresses with corresponding passwords. It is more for you to see if your email has been listed and if your password is a known one.
If you have time and more interest in the recent data hack, please see the following article from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/03/10/2-billion-unencrypted-records-leaked-in-marketing-data-breach-what-happened-and-what-to-do-next/#70eb7c786b0d
March 2019