EB is pretty cool,, she knows all the hacker terms like pwned and crack. I don’t know any of them, but if I need to know one she’ll tell me — reluctantly. Because you’re all good people like TC, you probably don’t know what pwned means, so EB told me it’s OK to tell you. Pwned means owned. And in the case of this interactive tip, pwned means someone has access to your email username and password — and therefore anything in your email account. Did I mention these hackers can also use your email account for nasty things — indeed they can.
Now you’re all curious to see if any of your email accounts have been pwned, aren’t you? You should be; one hundred fifty eight million is a lot of pwned email accounts, isn’t it? It’s even more email accounts than EB has. It’s a lot.
Seriously folks, this is serious business. We’ve harped at you until we’re blue in the fact about using strong passwords and about using a good password manager to create strong passwords and remember them for you. So if you haven’t done so by now, we’re not going to convince you. Maybe, if you discover that one or more of your email accounts has been pwned, and your emails and your email account or accounts are in the hands of criminals who could then use all your information for nasty deeds, you’ll listen to us and change all your passwords to strong passwords and download a good password manager like LastPass (free version) http://lastpass.com/ .
So go forth now and see if your email address or more then one of them has been pwned. Visit http://www.haveibeenpwned.com and see if you have been pwned. We hope not!
Whew!! I just checked my 8 email accounts and all OK. I TRUST YOU GUYS, or I NEVER would have
entered them at this website. I’m assuming that once checked, they are discarded.
I simply couldn’t believe all those Adobe accounts have been compromised. I assume those are all
professional “cloud” accounts and large data transfers between business/clients. i.e. presentations, advertising layouts, architects, etc??
Thank God, mine is not preowned! I hope that everyone is a fortunate as me. Thank you TC and EB!!!!!!
I also fortunate, my google account is not preowned either. It would behoove everyone to take advantage of this and check their e-mail account!
I checked the website link, and it said that my email address had been pwned… Now what do i do.. I don’t know ehich account it is.. Is there a way to find out which one.. and what do you do after that?.. alot of questions,, hope you have some answers.. Thanks..
You need to change your password…to something very strong.
I have been pwned on the Adobe site. What can I do about it & does that make me vulnerable for other sites, etc.?
I ran this and it said there is one. How do I find out more information?
It’s ironic that you should bring this article to the attention of your readers as just yesterday I received 17 messages from postmaster@optonline.net with the subject being – Delivery Notification: Delivery has failed. I emailed Emsisoft to submit these “suspicious files” and they responded with the following statement: ” Its hard to say for sure but it looks like your email account has been hacked and is used to send out spam. In order to stop this, it is recommended to change your email password as soon as possible.” I use Outlook Express 6 and I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about changing my password. As it turns out I needed to do it through my ISP and now that I have changed it to a much stronger one I haven’t received any more of those emails. I’m not sure if this meant that my email was pwned but I learned a valuable lesson the hard way.