92 PCWorld MARCH 2021HERE’S HOW HOW TO TELL IF YOUR PASSWORD HAS BEEN STOLEN
monitoring services that will reveal if
your password has been stolen. Most
are designed to let you quickly take
action and change passwords.BASIC SERVICES
TO REVEAL EMAIL
BREACHES
Two reputable services to check this
information existed at the time of the
Collections breach and still do:
HaveIBeenPwned (go.pcworld.com/
hvbn), and a service run by the Hass-
Platner-Institut (go.pcworld.com/hplt)
in Potsdam, Berlin. Both ask you to
enter your email address (not your
password!), and both will then match
your email address against a database of
known breaches.
Both services have their appeal.
HaveIBeenPwned’s reputation attracts those
who wish to publicize their attacks, so the
site’s breach reporting seems comprehensive.
The site will list the breaches that an email
address has been caught up in, along with
any corollary information—such as your
gender or what your phone number is, forHPI will send you a matrix of what information has been released in conjunction with your email,
organized by most recent.HaveIBeenPwned supplies a large amount of information in
regard to breaches, but it could be better organized.example. The site organizes the breaches by
the service attacked, not the date. Why is this
important? Because if your email was
exposed in a breach in 2016, for example,
chances are that you’ve changed your
password since then. But if your email and
password were exposed last month, you’ll
want to change them right away.
HaveIBeenPwned also publishes the
breach information for any email address,