Free online tool to find out if your email has been hacked

Above: A screenshot from the website when I found out one of my emails had been hacked!
And no, that's not my email address ;-)

Australian security researcher Daniel Grzelak has built a cool website which lets you quickly check if any of your online account logins has been compromised by the recent hacks by groups such as LulzSec and Gnosis. The site is called https://shouldichangemypassword.com/. No passwords are stored on the site, it is simply a free service which lets you find out if your email address has been compromised and whether you should change all the passwords that use that email address as a login.

He has currently amassed a database containing only the emails of 13 recent hacking attacks, and this will be updated as more occur. If one of your emails has been hacked, you are given a message which tells you exactly when it occurred.  You can then look on the sources page of the website to find out details of which attack led to your password being stolen.

After trying the website with all of my email addresses, I found to my horror that one actually had been hacked, and that it was due to the Attack on Gawker Media that happened back on December 12, 2010. Luckily I don't use the same password for any other of my online logins, so nothing bad came out of that particular hack. However plenty of people do use the same email login and password for many online accounts, and have been scammed. This is another reason to be vigilant when it comes to your password security.

Further Reading:

• How to choose a good password
• Password Storage 101

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