Is your email password compromised?

[Dominic]

A thread on the security section has prompted me to post on the general forum about password security.

There is an easy way to check if your email address and password are known to the hacking community.

Go to this site:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

There you can enter your email and it will tell you if you are on any of the lists.

Once it has done that, it will no doubt offer services to help security, I only used it for checking the email address though.

I checked it with an old email address I knew to be hacked, and it confirmed that. I also checked another email address and it said it was clean.

For more info on the site, check out wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_I_Been_Pwned%3F

Eventually I will move this thread to Technology but I thought it deserved wider attention.

If you are on the list, you want to change passwords on all your online accounts that use that password. Do this by visiting the relevent sites in the browser and changing passwords in the user control panels. Don't respond to emails telling you to change your password.

[Maggie B]

Thanks for that Dominic.

Maggie B

[Jim B]

Yes Dom
My laptop was hit the other day; they wanted $7000 in Bit Coins they would freeze the hard drive and send a porn web site to my outlook contacts which they would suggest I had been viewing. Fortunately I was in the process of upgrading my hard drive to a solid state one so had made a back up the files. Just took the old one out and put the new one in and then reformatted the old drive.
More of a nuisance than anything else. Changed my passwords of course.

[Kili01]

Thanks for the link, Dominic. I checked mine today. Apparently all were OK! Which was a relief.
Dee

[Jim B]

Dee
You will know if you get an email with an unknown name and your password in the title.

Jim

[jagwheels]

Thanks for the link from me as well Dominic

[JimX]

Jim is correct. above.

Problem is with emails they are available to all after some time and in fact, many companies store email list that you maybe on.
The Ransome mail that I had said they were going to send to all in my inbox porn if I did not pay a lot of cash via Bitcoin, they even had an old password I used to use, not sure apart from removing your email address contacts and getting a new email address, also change all of your passwords, how you can defeat the scum that does this, then maybe completely clean your PC out. I really hope this never happens to anyone here as it is a nightmare.

[bmwx5]

I recently had the same email from someone calling themselves The Dark Web same scenario send 1000$US in Bitcoin or else all my contacts would be sent Porn sites or other such links.
When I checked my email on the site shown above to see if it was compromised it was for an outlook account but the password sent in the email was one I used many years ago for the LinkIn site which on a quick glance looked like they had hacked my outlook account. Just to be sure I contacted Microsoft Outlook and reset my security detail contacts. At my work ITT make us change the password every 30 days regardless.

[Jim B]

Mine was a currently used password so had to go through the whole procedure of changing it; just in case.

Jim

[JimX]

The last paragraph is correct if you get one of these ransom emails you just may panic, rightly or wrongly, changing all of your passwords and changing your email address is not fun I can tell you.

[mikesjn]

I always use a different password for each account, created with a random password generator (I use a few different ones and vary the password complexity - often because of the site.), I also have different emails for different types of things; one for banking, another for ebay, Amazon level stuff etc. I also use a password manager, I am looking at Bitwarden at the moment - which has a free option, I look for ones with search and reporting, then finding the compromised account is easy. I do not store banking passwords etc in a manager and use the local database variety. I recently got one of these emails and on checking the password it turned out to be the online account for an old EE phone and not my email account, I haven't been with EE for years and the account was no longer active.
I change all passwords at least once a year and note the old password and date of change in the password manager notes, it sounds a lot, but just do a few a week and it becomes habit and a nothing job. Using the same password seems easy, but one breach and you have to change the lot, usually in a panic, you also have the added benefit of easily working out if it matters and which account may be the issue.