Today, it is more and more frequent that you are asked to open a customer account to have access to the services offered by a website: online sales, access to free information, tourist reservation, make online payment…
E-mail address and password of your choice are a minimum, to which you may add your name, first name, address, date of birth and even bank details.
Unfortunately, websites are regularly exposed to cyber attacks and internet threats and may be hacked, causing personal data of users to leak on the Internet. the most popular is a phishing attack.
Among those that have made the most noise in the last 5 years, we can mention Yahoo (1 billion accounts hacked), eBay (145 million), LinkedIn (117 million), Badoo (112 million), Dropbox (70 million)…
Email addresses and associated passwords are sold, exchanged…
Under these circumstances, how to be sure not to be part of the billions of users whose information would have leaked in recent years?
Several sites regularly list, sometimes even daily, the sites whose data have been compromised. They allow you to check, from your email address, if it is possible that you are concerned.
Practical case
From there, two possibilities. Your screen turns green: you can be reassured, you are not concerned.
On the other hand, if the screen turns red, it means that one of the sites on which you were registered has been hacked.
The tool gives you the name of the site, a short description of the consequences of the cyber attack, and the nature of the corrupted data. Here, in this case, the email address and the password.
Are you concerned?
First of all, it seems essential to change your password on the hacked site.
Secondly, you should also change your password for all websites for which you use the same address and password. Indeed, once they have recovered your credentials, hackers are likely to test them on several websites that could have even more sensitive data about you.
You’re not affected – how can you prevent myself from internet malware?
Avoid using the same credentials (email address and password) on multiple websites. Above all, use a specific password for sites where you have entered sensitive data: credit card number, social security number…
Change your passwords regularly.