You’d be astonished if you thought about all the accounts and different passwords you have today: from your social media accounts to your travel and hotel accounts, personal and business email, and, even, your bank accounts. And, as you become more involved in online profiles, more incidences of intrusion, data theft, and a lack of network security are reported. And, in other cases, the user’s ignorance can be an issue.
How do the tools work to check if there is a data breach?
Currently, there are a large number of tools to check if your email has been filtered, both recent and old leaks. The different tools use the leaked databases to check if your email is in them, and if they are, it will notify you that a data leak has occurred. You must take into account that these databases can have a size of terabytes of data since millions of emails are stored with their corresponding password hashes.
Use this tool to see if your email has been hacked
Fortunately, determining whether or not your email has been hacked does not require any special skills. There are web pages that, for example, evaluate if an email account has been compromised based on botnet or data leak analyses.
Botnets are infected computer networks that are frequently utilized for illegal activities without the users’ awareness. Typically, the bot software is placed on the victim’s PC via phishing emails. The Internet Security Office, for example, provides up-to-date information about this type of network, as well as updates on Trojans, spam, secure passwords, and other topics.
Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP) is a website that allows you to check if your email address has been hacked. The term “pwned” comes from the Internet slang and the gaming community, and refers to the word “owned.” Now, beyond the name of the tool, the functionality developed by Troy Hunt, a web security specialist, allows users to enter and verify whether or not their electronic mail has been hacked.
It offers a Notify me notification option that will notify you if your email address or username appears in any of the data leaks at any moment. To do so, simply enter your email address and complete a problem that is part of the security procedure (known as Captcha). This final step is taken to rule out the possibility that it is a robot and that you are a real person, ensuring that the service is better protected.
Tips for safety
In contemporary days, registering for online services that require a username and password is fairly popular. There are so many that we wind up with a tangle of registrations, usernames, and passwords that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of them all. And what is the option on which we are betting? For everything or practically everything, use the same username and password.
However, one account hacked, all other accounts we made using the same credentials are in danger. As a result, security experts advise avoiding using the same username and password for several profiles when registering for a service.
This is why, to have a more protected account, you should use a password generator. If you want to create a strong password, you should use uppercase, lowercase, digits, and symbols, with a minimum length of 12 characters. To assist you to keep your passwords safe, you can utilize password managers. These are comprehensive services that typically provide applications for a variety of platforms and can be free or paid depending on the features you require. And it’s because, in addition to saving your passwords, they also educate you on how to handle and care for them.
In general, these services allow you to preserve passwords so that you can use them whenever you want, allowing you to adhere to the recommendation that you use a different password for each site. Third-party password managers may also feature a mechanism for creating strong passwords automatically and randomly, as well as warnings that notify you when you have weak or overly repetitive passwords across different sites.
Measures to take if the email has been hacked
- Start the antivirus software
According to cybersecurity experts, when it is confirmed that an email has been hacked, this is the most important step to do. Bypass the quick scan settings and run a complete antivirus scan to discover and remove all types of malware, including Trojans and keylogger spyware, as well as potentially harmful programs.
- All passwords should be changed
After you’ve removed all malware from your computer, you should change your password. If you lose access to your email account, contact the email provider directly to verify your identity and seek a password reset.
- Please notify all of your contacts
Another precaution is to inform your friends and family, as well as others on your email contact list, that you have been attacked. During the period that hackers have access to your account, they can send a barrage of email threats to everyone in your address book, resulting in a new set of victims. By informing your contacts, they can take precautions to secure their gadgets and keep them clean to avoid being harmed. Stop using your primary email address and use a disposable or temporary email address for the time being.
- Alter your security questions
Although your password is usually the most vulnerable point of attack, hackers may be able to obtain access to your account by answering your security questions. When it comes to the most common security questions, the vast majority of consumers prefer to give the same responses.
Conclusion
To summarize, it is critical to maintain the security of your email account to avoid experiencing extremely unpleasant scenarios. To do so, you must take the necessary security precautions and check to see if your email account has been hacked, especially if you believe it has been so that your contacts do not suffer the same fate and further damage is avoided.
[Image via: Google Images]
