Have You Ever Been Hacked?

Dennis Snider

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With hacking techniques becoming ever more sophisticated, and new ways of attacking your data being invented every day, you really need to know when you are being attacked by malicious actors. The nature of hacking means that it won’t always be obvious when a criminal has got into your system, but there are websites that let you know whether you’ve been exposed to vulnerabilities.

A long-standing player, and one of the most popular websites, is “Have I Been Pwned” (haveibeenpwned.com). Just by entering your email address, the site can run checks for you to let you know if it’s been compromised. If you want to verify your email address, it can run deeper searches for you. Additionally, you can subscribe to email alerts that will let you know as soon as the site detects any breach on your account.

BreachAlarm operates in a similar way to Have I Been Pwned, checking emails for any signs of incursion. This site offers subscription services ($30 per year) that are not necessarily useful for individual users, but that could be helpful for small businesses or large families running multiple email accounts.

DeHashed offers the same sort of services related to email addresses as the offerings above, but additionally it can provide you with more information regarding your vulnerability to hackers. It can run checks on your phone number, name, address, IP address, usernames etc. The interface isn’t as intuitive as some other services, and many results require subscriptions ($5.49 for a week, $180 a year), but this is a useful service for those who want a really deep dive on their security profile.

Sucuri Security Scanner looks at the problem from a different angle, letting you run checks on a complete site to look for bugs, vulnerabilities, blacklisting, and any footprints of hackers. Again, you’ll have to pay to use most of the services, but if you have a website that connects with the public it can be extremely worthwhile.

The sites listed above are well-known and reputable; bear in mind that hackers are not above setting up fake offerings that claim to check whether you are being hacked while in fact harvest your details and expose you to an even greater danger of hacking.