An email address and a password are generally sufficient to access an online service. But this valuable information may have been stolen by a hacker who uses it without your knowledge. To be sure, a check is necessary.
Passwords are a bit like the tires on a car. They must not only be resistant but also change them regularly, your safety is at stake. And yet, according to the ranking unveiled at the beginning of November 2023 by NordPass, NordVPN’s password manager, it seems that the French take the threat of password theft relatively little seriously. The researchers thus screened databases of stolen sesames circulating on the Dark Web but also accessible to the public. As a result, the most commonly used passwords are quite distressing: 123456 and its elongated variant 123456789 remain at the top of the ranking, followed by the timeless azerty And admin. And yet, frequently, new cases of data theft and identity theft remind us how important it is to use long and strong passwords, mixing letters, numbers, uppercase letters, lowercase letters and special characters without forgetting change it regularly.
Enough to avoid major moments of panic when a hacker who has obtained your username and the password associated with one of your online accounts begins to use it for you. The risks: usurping your identity, stealing your personal and/or professional data, accessing your banking information in order to make purchases in your name, take out online loans, etc. But how can we know if some of them are not already circulating freely on the Web? Many online services are subject to cyberattacks every year. And if you haven’t changed your identifiers for a long time, there is a chance that they appear on blacklists exchanged or sold between pirates. To get a clear idea of the situation, you can rely on free online services.
To find out if your email address or mobile number is in a hacker database, two web services allow you to carry out a quick check. The most known, Have I Been Pwnd? – which could be translated as “has my password been hacked?” – will scan databases containing accounts stolen following cyberattacks. All you need to do is provide an email address or mobile phone number (indicate it with the country code starting with +33) that you regularly use to access an online service.
Second service also very efficient: CyberNews. It will also scan stolen databases looking for your email address or mobile number and deliver its results to you within a second.
An alert popped up after checking on Have i Been Pwnd or CyberNews? Your email address or phone number is therefore part of a corrupt database. Each of the two services lists websites or platforms victims of data leaks or theft. It is therefore strongly recommended that you go to the site concerned and immediately change the password associated with your identifier… and update it regularly. Hoping a hacker hasn’t already gotten hold of it.