In the past 5 years, millions of accounts and email addresses have been leaked, stolen and sold. This is as a result of data breaches, many of which have affected huge company’s such as Adobe, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Yahoo & Dropbox.

The website ‘Have I Been Pwnend’ allows users to check if their email/account has been compromised/ leaked in over 147 high profile data breaches. You can see a full list of the breached websites here. The website provides in detail, information about when the leaks occurred, the cause and how many accounts were breached.

To check if your email or account has been breached, simply go to www.haveibeenpwned.com. On the home page you will be prompted to enter your email address or username. Then press the ‘pwned?’ button to perform a search, to see if your account has been compromised.

If your email/account is not an affected account, the screen will turn green.

The screen will turn red if you have been compromised. Information on how you have been breached will also appear.

If you have been affected, we advise changing your password. We also advise being aware of spam emails, suspicious phone calls and phishing scams. To generate a new strong secure password, we recommend using the ‘Strong Password Generator’ tool.