Significant data leaks aren’t exactly uncommon these days. It seems as if every other month or so, another company is hit and many of its users are forced to change their passwords, and worse, worry about whether the perpetrators already got their hands on their data.
However, some good Samaritans out there are attempting to give people some peace of mind by developing tools to help them determine if they’ve fallen victim to such data breaches. Troy Hunt, an Australian software developer, is one of those good guys.
Hunt is the brains behind Haveibeenpwned.com, a new website that lets people check if they’re on the wrong side of not one, but several data leaks that have occurred in the last couple of years. This includes the recent Adobe leak, as well as other infiltrations suffered by Gawker in 2010, Stratfor in 2011, Sony in 2011, Yahoo in 2012 and, the latest, Pixel Federation just this month.
How to Check if Your Data Has Been Stolen Using Ihavebeenpwned.com
All you need to do to make Haveibeenpwned.com work for you is to head over to the site, enter your e-mail address and click the “pwned?” button to the right. Haveibeenpwned.com will automatically check if your e-mail address and any accounts associated between it and the above-named services have been compromised. You’ll immediately be told whether you’ve been hit, or you’re in the clear.
Here’s some more good news. Hunt says that he plans to contribute to the site by adding data from breaches that occur down the line. However, he just has one request from the public.
“No, don’t go and breach a system in order to contribute to this project!”
Fair enough.
