It’s becoming more and more important to take care of your online activities, your passwords, the places you visit and what you do. With companies like Facebook having millions of their users accounts’ compromised recently it’s a real possibility that some of your personal information has fallen into the hands of hackers and therefore criminals.
On the 30th September 2018 Facebook lost 30 million of their users’ account details to hackers who had exploited a vulnerability caused by three bugs on the Facebook system. It’s likely that you will already have been contacted if you were one of the unfortunate 30 million people involved, however if you want to be sure then visit the page https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice whilst logged into Facebook and scroll to the bottom. You will see a blue highlighted section titled “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?” and below that will be a message detailing whether or not your account was affected.
This, and all of the other high profile hacks brings me onto another great website that can check to see if your email address has ever been associated with any hacked sites. It tells you which sites and which information has been compromised. Armed with this information you can at least decide whether you want to continue to use the services of the companies that breached your data and if you do, you can take steps to change your password and lock down your security on those affected sites.
If you go along to https://haveibeenpwned.com you’ll have the option to check your email address in the search bar at the top of the page. Click the “pwned” button to find out whether your email address has ever been compromised and on which sites – you’ll see this information if you scroll down a little.
If your account has been compromised, then you can assume that whatever password and email combination you used is now known by hackers, so the first thing to do would be to change your password on the site that was hacked. The next sensible thing to do, would be to change your password on any other un-compromised sites where you use the same combination of email address and password as this is now not safe.
You see, once a hacker has this information, they know that many people use the same email address and password for multiple different services, so better to be on the safe side and change any accounts where you use the same email address and password. Also a good idea moving forward would be to use a different password for each service that you use, yes I know this means more things to remember but it also decreases the chance of multiple accounts being compromised at the same time.