Has your info been compromised in a data breach?

bychrisbailey

1.1K followers

10 years ago

I think most of us have heard or read about the myriad of security breaches and hacked websites that have compromised the information of millions of people.

Have you ever wondered if your information is "out there" somewhere? I have.

A few weeks ago, I received a startling email from Amazon that stated:

Hello,

At Amazon we take your security and privacy very seriously. As part of our routine monitoring, we discovered a list of email address and password sets posted online. While the list was not Amazon-related, we know that many customers reuse their passwords on several websites. We believe your email address and password set was on that list. For your security, we have assigned a temporary password to your account.

You will need to reset your password when you return to the Amazon.com site. To reset your password, click "Your Account" at the top of any page on Amazon.com. On the Sign In page, click the "Forgot your password?" link to reach the Amazon.com Password Assistance page. After you enter your email or mobile phone number, you will receive an email containing a personalized link. Click the link from the email and follow the directions provided.

Your new password will be effective immediately. We recommend that you choose a password that you have never used with any website.

Sincerely,

Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com

At first glance, I would normally consider an email like this to be a potential phishing attempt, but it didn't have the usual red flags, so I decided to look into it a little more.

I quickly found an article on Forbes from 2014 titled These Sites Tell Which Of Your Accounts Have Been Hacked -- http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2014/04/14/...

After reading through that I decided to visit the sites mentioned and see if my email account was included in any of the compromised info.

I went to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and entered my email address, which yielded the following result:

Not a surprise quite frankly. I've changed passwords several times since that Adobe breach back in October of 2013 so I'm not overly concernced.

The other sites mentioned in the Forbes article are PwnedList https://pwnedlist.com/ and Shouldichangemypassword.com which is now called https://breachalarm.com/

It might be worth a look to see if your info is out there and at the very least is a good reminder to do what you can to make yourself less susceptible to being victimized.

Stay safe and have a great day.

Chris B.