Despite our frequent tirades about using strong and secure passwords, we know that many of you continue to use the same weak password for everything. And we know that many of you who do this have escaped unscathed – and none of your accounts or email addresses have been “hacked”. Or have they?
How do you know if your email address (or one or more of them) have been “hacked”? Well your buddies TC and EB are always looking out for you – and we’ve discovered a web site that you can visit and check to see if your email address has been “hacked” or not. While this Web site cannot guarantee if it shows your email address had not been “hacked” – it will search the databases of all the records turned over by hackers to the public. So there’s a good change that if your email address has been hacked, this site will tell you.
You’re interested, right? The site is called ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com. Yes, it does reside on a secure server too. So feel free to enter any of your email addresses here and find out if your email address (or any of your email addresses) have been hacked.
Here’s a little info from ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com
“ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com has been created to help the average person check if their password(s) may have been compromised and need to be changed.
This site uses a number of databases that have been released by hackers to the public. No passwords are stored in the ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com database.
This website is made available as a public service. Please help me maintain it by donating.”
That’s it. If you’re intrigued and want to check your email address (or addresses) visit https://shouldichangemypassword.com right now. See what turns up – for all of you who continue to use weak, easily-guessable passwords for everything, we hope nothing turns up.
I tried it with my email address that had been hacked into about six months ago but it said it was safe so it didn’t work for me.
This would only indicate if your email was hacked and dissemeninated on a list of hacked email addresses. It has nothing to do with your email address being hacked by some individual who knows you or some kid playing around guessing passwords. If your email address was hacked by hacking groups it would have been placed on databases and would have been available to spammers and phishing sites – etc. It has nothing to do with individuals or people who don’t like you “hacking” your email address. I believe the state states this – and also said that the absence of your email address on this site does not necessarily mean you weren’t hacked or you were.
It’s always important not to assume anything. There is nothing in life that is 100% certain – and this is even more true on the Web.
TC
TC … just want to let you know what else they did besides sending emails to all my contacts that I was stranded in England and needed money… also deleted all my contacts. I stupidly changed the password but not the email address. So when I sent out emails, I wasn’t getting any replies. I figured out that when anyone did a “reply to” the emails were sent to an address identical to mine except one number was eliminated. I had six numbers in the address so unless you looked closely you couldn’t tell that a number was missing. Now thanks to all your warnings since then I have a password that will be so hard to break.
Hy TC, Thanks for the site. I tried it and so far all was o.k. Like you said it does not mean that it has not been hacked but just knowing that apparently it was not is alright for me for now. I will change some of my email passwords to better ones though. Thanks again and God Bless Irene