AfterDawn: Tech news

'Have I Been Pwned' offers a quick way to see if your email was part of a database breach

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 08 Dec 2013 10:53 User comments (6)

'Have I Been Pwned' offers a quick way to see if your email was part of a database breach Nowadays, it seems like every other week a major corporation or website is seeing an attack on their databases, with email addresses, passwords and other personal info being stolen by the attackers.
A new website wants to make it easier to see if your information has been stolen, by integrating the stolen databases into one larger database that you can search by your email.

Computer scientist Troy Hunt created "Have i been pwned?," allowing you to search the hundreds of millions of accounts exposed by the breaches at Adobe, Gawker, Yahoo and Stratfor (among others).

For example, thankfully my two main emails were not "pwned" but an older one was found to be part of Adobe's leak. As explained by the site: "Adobe. The big one. In October 2013, 153 million accounts were breached with each containing an internal ID, username, email, encrypted password and a password hint in plain text. The password cryptography was poorly done and many were quickly resolved back to plain text. The unencrypted hints also disclosed much about the passwords adding further to the risk that hundreds of millions of Adobe customers already faced."

Previous Next  

6 user comments

18.12.2013 12:14

Yay! No pwnage found for me.

28.12.2013 12:36

This is what people do to collect email addresses

38.12.2013 13:11

Originally posted by Igmutaka:
This is what people do to collect email addresses
my thoughts exactly lol

410.12.2013 12:16

Originally posted by DarkJello:
Originally posted by Igmutaka:
This is what people do to collect email addresses
my thoughts exactly lol
Dmn I just gave them 4...

515.12.2013 19:17

Originally posted by Igmutaka:
This is what people do to collect email addresses
LOL...yep, Social Engineering at it's finest...HAHA! Tell people to check their email against a list and harvest a gazillion email addy's...brilliant.

Fortunately tho, this guy seems pretty legit & spells things out clearly in the FAQ's.
I got hit from the Stratfor leak...damn, that addy has been clean for 15 years until now.
This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 15 Dec 2013 @ 7:20

615.12.2013 19:18

Originally posted by dEwMe:
Originally posted by DarkJello:
Originally posted by Igmutaka:
This is what people do to collect email addresses
my thoughts exactly lol
Dmn I just gave them 4...
dEwMe...you just been done...;)

Comments have been disabled for this article.

News archive